[guitar music]
Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt! How are you doing?
Matt: I am fine.
Dave: Good! Good. So are we recording?
Matt: We are recording.
Dave: We are recording, okay. Uhh... let me just grab my first stack of papers here. “Dave, I got the Q’s for your A’s, Matt. Before we get to the show, I figure I should mention that Dagon talked to me about the…” And I'm gonna stop there. And then, “I've already had a phone conversation with both him and… we'll call him Citizen K…”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: “And they both asked me to keep it quiet until they're ready to make an announcement. So if it comes up, I'ma have to cut it from broadcast and save it for later. Just an FYI.” So… if I say, and I'm going to leave a space here so that this will be an easy editing job for you, if I say… space, that's not allowed?
Matt: I mean, I can-- I've discovered it's getting easier and easier to cut stuff as I assemble the podcast, and as I assemble the videos. So yeah, I can trim anything at this point. I'm actually learning how to do this after, what, three years?
Dave: [laughs] Well you're still ahead of me, I still don't know how to edit stuff on on the video camera and I'm sure there's any number of ways to edit stuff on the video camera, but I just got as far as as “dub” and that was it.
Matt: Well, I think you can edit in the camera but it's a lot more work than editing afterward where you just take the footage and cut what you need.
Dave: Or just paying attention and saying, “I'm just not gonna do anything that needs editing.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Uh okay, so… but in answer to my question is, is that what I'm not allowed to say, or are we not allowed to discuss it?
Matt: Well, we can discuss it, but, I just have this feeli-- you know, as I said to them I'm under a verbal NDA. You know, I'm not gonna discuss it quote unquote in public, but I mean it's a minority of a minority of a minority. I mean, the amount of people who are gonna be “They said what?” are listening right now, but if I were to…
[jump cut]
Dave: Uh all right. So, it's my turn to remember Jeff, and I’m remembering Jeff this time. This one dates back to September 2005 when Jeff was living at 14500 Marsh Lane in Addison, Texas, and it's… this is one of those, I think we can both agree that Jeff could be a real… nuisance. Jeff could be a real pain in the behind, almost effortlessly, and this is one of the examples of that. Where September 2005, by that point, Collected Letters 2004 had come out and I was at the point of having to face the fact that having put together this giant book of my post-Cerebus correspondents, not only did they did not sell very well, not only were there are no reorders, there was absolutely no comment about it. And so it was one of those, I thought I was doing something really really cool [laughs] and the consensus was, “Oh not not only wasn't this really really cool, this was really really stupid and really really expensive and nobody's interested.” Which is why it's interesting that guys like Mike Sewall are now totally jazzed about Collective Letters 2004. Anyway, as part of the introduction to Collected Letters 2004 I said, “Where a word is misspelled and uncorrected that means Claude Flowers, who was very kind to help proofread the manuscript, and I both missed one. D’oh. And notification will be grudgingly welcomed for future editions and Jeff had circled “grudgingly” and had written “cute!” in the mark in the margin and said as a result, this is again written on the on the introduction page. “Dear Dave, you asked for it. I'm going to send 10 to 15 pages per week over the next yea, assuming it will be at least a year until you reprint this, or until you tell me to stop. Also feel free to correct my corrections” and then wrote at the bottom of the introduction page, “Dave don't use journalistic (underlined) editorial style use literary (underlined) style. Proper English!” [laughs] And then he writes, “This is my only first edition copy, but it's easier to do it in this fashion”, which means he just tore the page out of the book and wrote all of this on it. “If you don't get any of my proofreading marks, let me know please, and remember you (grudgingly) asked for it.” So that's what I got! I got the first [laughs] I guess after all of this deafening silence about my giant pile of work that I had done, I got the first 15 pages of my own book torn out and written all over by Jeff Seiler correcting my letters. And it's like, oh you… [laughs] I think I'm pretty sure since I only got the first 15 pages, that I wrote to him I said, “Collected Letters doesn't work like that. These are my letters. When I'm writing letters I'm neither thinking in terms of journalistic style, or literary style. I'm just writing a letter to somebody. This is what my letters read like.” By contrast, I got a letter from Fabio, who was one of the people that I wrote to, who lives in Italy. And he had what I had intended, three or four corrections. I had misspelled Martin Scorsese, as an example. So it's a matter of, “Oh, that's not how you spell Martin Scorsese.” So that one should have been corrected, but Jeff Seiler had just decided, “We're gonna rewrite all of your letters in Collected Letters 2004 so that they conform to what i consider proper literary style.” And only Jeff Seiler could do something like that. It's one of those things that definitely gave me a sense at many junctures that this was one of the reasons that that God put Jeff Seiler on the Earth, was to come up with stuff like this just to irritate Dave Sim. So, there's my Jeff Seiler story, and that's just the introduction. So when it's my turn the next couple of times, I will be letting people know exactly what Jeff thought my Collectors should have read like 17 years ago. So there you go!
Matt: So, an interesting postscript to that story… [laughs] is, I was out at a comic book shop that wasn't my local shop and I saw Collected Letters and I hadn't gotten it at my shop and this is back in the early 2000s when I was practically living at the store.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I met Paula at this point, but I was still going almost weekly and picking up my file, and it wasn't there, it wasn't there, and I ran across a copy, so I bought it. And then the next week, it was in my file. So I had two copies of Collected Letters.
Dave: [laughs] Okay.
Matt: And obviously, you know, at the time, it was one of those, “Well, I really don't need one…” and we were all getting together for Ye Bookes of Cerebus in Olean, and Lenny Cooper, one of the moderators of the Yahoo Group, had let it slip that he had skipped buying it because he didn't see the point. And I'm like, we'll give Lenny my second copy, and everyone that's there that has a letter will sign the book, and give it to him, and then it's then he has to keep it because it's signed by all of us! And as I was having Jeff sign it, he's like, “You know I took my copy and started ripping the pages out and sending corrections to Dave so I don't have a complete copy anymore.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I went, “Well, if you had mentioned this a few months ago, we would be signing it to you, Jeff!”
Dave: [laughs] And his reaction was?
Matt: He kind of looked at me like, “Well, you know, I mean now I don't have one.” And we're going, “Well we're giving this to Lenny like literally right now! You're gonna finish signing it, we're gonna hand it to Lenny and go, ‘here you go, Lenny.’” [laughs]
Dave: Right, right. [laughs] And you know, it's one of those things that my wounded pride at the time. that this was the only only reaction that I had gotten through Collected Letters was, “Ah come on, the guy bought a $35 book and is now tearing it apart to try and improve it. Which is, you know, certainly a noble thing for him to do, the least you can do since you're sitting on,” however many copies I still had by September 2005 of the original 5000 copy print run, probably 4980 now, that's an exaggeration but I still had a bunch of them. ”Why don't you send a free copy to Jeff and personalize it throughout. And it's like, that was always part of the Jeff Seiler experience, as well, was “This is a test. There's the God approved way of reacting to Jeff here, and there's the automatic human reaction, and this is the other reason that Jeff Seiler has been put on the Earth and put into your life, is to make sure that the situation is always going to leave you right on the 50-yard line, and you're really gonna have to pay attention to make sure that you're doing the right thing here.” In that case, I didn't do the right thing. I just wrote to Jeff and told him, in no uncertain terms, what the intention of my grudgingly was in the introduction. Well, I had no idea that there was another part of that story, so thank you! This is another reason that we have to keep remembering Jeff so we can start piecing all of this stuff together.
And then we begin the Q’s for your A's. “ Eddie sent me: Oh I forgot to mention; this might make a good question for the next PLEASE HOLD. From our man at the High-End art auction site: This may be common knowledge but Dave’s earliest pages appear to have been cut by hand, because a few of the page edges for issue 4 weren’t perfectly square. I noticed because they wouldn’t line up exactly with the edges of the scanner. I wonder if Dave cut them himself to save money." Uh, yes! Dave certainly did do that. Wherever I was buying them I think it was… that was still Schendel’s Stationary in Waterloo, which was a stationary store of a very very good size. Not Staples-size, but the size of a good-sized stationary store at the time, and the second floor was all devoted to art materials and I would go in and buy my art boards that I was drawing on. I think it was just basic bristol board at the time. I think I had stopped buying the Mayfair paper which always felt to me, and looked to me, like the Strathmore paper that the cartoonists drew on. Which I knew professional cartoonists did draw on Strathmore paper and this was the closest that I could get to the texture of the original artwork that I owned, not realizing that the Mayfair paper that that I was using was far better suited to watercolor and consequently was very porous and really didn't work and play well with India ink from pen nibs and brushes. So eventually I stopped buying that, and then went, okay time to move up a weight class on that, and that was around issue 18, 19, 20, somewhere around there, that I started buying the illustration board. But yes, at the time whatever Schendel’s Stationary charged to cut artboard down to size, it was 25 cents a cut or something like that, and it's like, “Forget it! I'll get them full size and just get them to roll them up and take them on the bus all the way back to Kitchener. This giant tube, and I'll cut them down myself and not charge myself 25 cents, so there you go. Yes, if you try to line up any of the early “Cerebus” pages with a scanner, you will definitely notice, uh no, not only were these not cut professionally, they weren't cut on a cutting board. This was just Dave taking his ruler and getting an idea of “okay this is where 11 by 17 is” and putting that on with a pencil and a ruler and then just taking a ordinary pair of sewing scissors and cutting my pages down to size and then I was ready to draw my funny books.
Which leads to the Death’s Dark Tread auction, “which my brave band of rebels is as of this writing winning but there's 14 days to go”, and is that still the case? That they're still winning?
Matt: Yes! Yes.
Dave: Okay…
Matt: I get an email from Heritage every day with “these are your bids” and I bid on a whole bunch of original art and I'm only winning this one because of the kind and generous people that have said “we'll give you money, Matt” and if they back out I'm gonna hunt them down.
Dave: [laughs] You on the hook for some big coin!
Matt: Option A is everybody's nice and polite and gives me the money if we win, and option B is we get outbid and I can stop sweating.
Dave: Right, right. So you are the one on the hook, this is your heritage account auction…
Matt: Yep!
Dave: …account account that you have. Okay, all right, so what's the total dollar amount on issue #4 that you've got in hand?
Matt: Uh, everybody that said, “Okay I'll kick in” it's like 11,000 and 200, I think or close to 11,200?
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I put the bid at 10,000 and didn't do the math right, so now I'm on the hook because it's 12,000 with the buyer's premium.
Dave: Haw haw!
Matt: Yeah, you warned me about that too, a while back!
Dave: Yes, yes the buyer’s premium, which, I don't know what kind of a house Jim Halperin's living in, but a lot of that house was paid for by my buyer's premium. It's a healthy chunk that they charge you to to win an auction at Heritage Auction.
Matt: Twenty percent.
Dave: Okay, go ahead?
Matt: It’s 20%, whatever you bid they add 20% as the buyer's premium, and I was doing the math and keeping it nice and steady, and then I'm like, okay you know a bunch of money came in at once and I'm doing the math in my head and I'm like “I forgot to carry the one”.
Dave: [laughs] And that’s a very bad spot, where you definitely want to remember to carry the one.
Matt: I'm really hoping that in the next 14 days somebody goes, “Oh I really really really want to get in on this” and I'm going to say, “And I really really really really want you to.”
Dave: [laughs] Okay! And that brings us in an interesting direction because I'm going, uh okay, I don't know how your brave stalwart band is going to do, but Dave Sim, or at least Aardvark-Vanaheim, is kind of obligated to become part of your brave band. So I'm going to commit that Aardvark-Vanaheim will go 2000 US with the understanding that Aardvark-Vanaheim will get one of the pages.
Matt: Well, the deal was when we first started and it was just me and my measly $200 that wasn't gonna get anything and i was putting the together it was, ”Hey, if we all pool our money we can win this auction and then we'll send everything back to Dave” because I'm the kind of guy that, you know, 200 bucks? Eh, it's a lot of money, but at the same time, yeah I can swing that, and if enough of us… you know, we're all Cerebus fans! This makes sense! You know, it's essentially like a CAN Kickstarter where, you know, 100 bucks and you're going to get prints of all 22 pages and the recreated cover. And everybody started asking, “Well who's paying for that?” I'm like, I'm going to burn that bridge when I get to it.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And then it was… Larry Wooten was the first one that said “I'll give 2078.11” and I went okay, you know, 2000 for a page, because that's the average page rate that we're thinking the page would sell for, 78 for the year the issue came out, and then 11 cents for his CAN number. And I'm like okay and he was on board, “Okay, we win this thing, we send everything back to Aardvark-Vanaheim.” And then a couple people were like, “Oh yeah, I'll kick in two thousand dollars but I want a page” and I'm like well you know I mean, right now the intention is the good intention, and it was, “Yeah, you're right. I can't kick in two grand, I can only kick in 100” and it's like, all right, well, you know, every penny counts. And then Dion Turner kicked in 2500 and said, “Yeah, let's send everything back to Dave” and I'm like, okay. So the top two high rollers want to send everything back and as I said when this first started, money talks, bullshit walks. If you want to pledge the money, cash on the barrel head, we’ll do whatever you want. And then somebody came in with, “Well, you know, I'm willing to give 2100 but I want a page,” it's like, “Well”, and I asked Larry and Dion and at that point the scanner had gotten bought and there’re scans automatically going back to Aardvark-Vanaheim. Like, Aardvark Vanaheim is getting scans no matter if we win or not, so, “Well, does Dave need the art?” Well, you know, I mean it's one of those, if we win and one guy wants a page and 20 other people don't, you know, they want it to all go back well then okay you have almost the complete Issue Four. And it's been as I keep saying myself, this deal just keeps getting worse all the time because it keeps changing because, somebody kicks in money they want a page, okay, we can make that happen.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So the current plan is everybody that kicks in 2000 is guaranteed a page. Anybody that kicks in less, if we have less than 22 people, we'll let you have a page as long as like you're not kicking in five bucks.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And that's still a little nebulous, because I got to talk to everybody about, because there's like nine of us, so, “Okay, is everybody still cool with this or is somebody gonna get their panties in a bunch that they kicked in two grand and this guy only kicked in 600 and why are we gonna let the 600 dollar person have a page?” And I'm like, “Well, because it's Margaret, and Margaret deserves a page, right guys?”
Dave: [laughs; clears throat] This could only happen with Cerebus fandom, you do realize? I mean this is one of the implications of… you know, my strict policy over the years of going, “No, this is about the fans. It's, these people are as close to the center of this thing as you can possibly get, apart from being Dave Sim. Which is why, like, I understand what you're doing and I think we can't be surprised that it's going in these strange directions because everybody has their own take on each of these things. Which is why I'm going, “Hey, I want to play too!” In terms of… I've never done this before. I have never purchased Cerebus artwork on behalf of Aardvark-Vanaheim using Aardvark-Vanaheim's money, and in a specific sense, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for Aardvark-Vanaheim to do this from two angles. Which is Aardvark-Vanaheim can't consider it an investment because i don't sell the artwork. So it's all overhead, but at the same time it's a good investment because the earliest Cerebus pages are the most valuable Cerebus pages they have the widest market and the widest number of people who would go, “I wouldn't ordinarily buy Cerebus artwork but if I was going to buy Cerebus artwork, this is what I would buy, is one of the earliest pages.” So presumably those pages will increase in value, so this becomes more of a second administration thing, Eddie Khanna, instead of the first administration, Dave Sim, thing because it's, the odds that I would get down to the point of having to sell a page from “Cerebus” #4 if Aardvark-Vanaheim had one in the Cerebus Archive are extremely slim. There's a lot of stuff, I would sell virtually everything else in the Off-White House that isn't nailed down and in the the off-site storage before I would sell a #4 page. So it's one of those, this makes a lot of sense, this makes absolutely no sense, gosh that sounds like a Cerebus experience! That's why I'm saying Aardvark-Vanaheim is in for a page, and we'll just say that in the larger sense what i'm trying to do is to save you from your math error.
Matt: Well, thank you…
Dave: You're welcome. [laughs]
Matt: And when I first posted that Heritage has… in every post I put the rigmarole, and it's the stuff that carries over from day to day and it changes a little bit, but usually it's, you know, the new “Cerebus in Hell” issue link to Previews, the link to the A Moment of Cerebus Teepublic store because every month they have sales so it's “Here's the link” and here's the verbatim text from the email they send me with the sale dates where it's the dates are whatever day whatever day and whatever day what to whatever day because there's usually two sales a month. “Tell your fans that they can get 35% off” and certain merch that they highlight, I think it's like hoodies, iPhone cases, and something else and and every time I quote it it's very much, “I'm quoting ad copy that I didn't write. I'm not going to rewrite it. If you've read this once, it's the same spiel day after day after day.”
Dave: “I'm not going to translate this into Cerebus-fan for you.”
Matt: I mean, I'm not even going to put a picture of some of the merchandise that we offer because here's the link, click over, you're going to see stuff, and like most of, I think, I'm trying to remember how many designs are on there now. It's gotta be at least a dozen or two, and some of them have never sold a single thing, and some of them are really popular, and it's one of those where when the email comes up, “You made a sale!” And I'm like, cool! We sold a t-shirt of Cerebus's head! All right, “your margin is two dollars” and I'm like…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: It's neat but at the same time like, I mean, I know I owe Aardvark-Vanaheim I think like a couple hundred bucks of, “These are the monthly profits.” Like, one month we made $40, yay us! And the next month we made I think $2.75?
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: It's not even an emotional rollercoaster at this point, it's the little kiddie rollercoaster that you stand by and watch your kid go in a little circle.
Dave: [laughs] Even if they fall, they couldn't hurt themselves. Yeah, I'm looking at that and I'm going, “I really don’t have time to go out and and shop for clothes.” I'm going, “I really could use some new gray hoodies for wintertime, because I've got like three or four of them, and two or three of them are on their last legs” and it's like, “I should buy Cerebus gray hoodies! And I should really talk to Matt about that and find out, okay, what's it gonna cost me for gray hoodies that have Cerebus on them?” And then it gets into, “Do I have to look at all of the designs? Or can I just say, can I get a Cerebus head on this one?” So, at some point up ahead, we will deal with that So, go ahead, I interrupted your story.
Matt: One of the links that's in the rigmarole is a link to Heritage because back when you first started selling stuff through Heritage 10 years ago I set up an email link of, “I'm looking for Dave Sim stuff.” So it sends me every time there's an auction coming up, it's “Here's the Dave Sim stuff “and it's usually like graded books, there was some Glamourpuss stuff when the Glamourpuss auction started, and it's one of these, when something showed up I would highlight it of, “Hey, there's you know a graded copy of Issue Eight 9.6 if you're interested” and then now it's just a “Here's a link to Heritage” and the link says Heritage has really neat stuff and then I'll highlight something when it comes up. Well, when the issue 4 original art came I'm like, I put, “Including all 22 pages of the original art plus a recreation of the cover” and Eddie sent me an email going , “All 22 pages?!” and I'm like, that's kind of what I'm thinking. And we emailed back and forth a bit, and at one point, he's like, “I kind of wonder if it's Seiler’s because you know Jeff has the closest association with Elrod in Cerebus fandom.” And I'm like, I don't think so because Jeff never mentioned that he owned Issue Four in its entirety, and that's the kind of thing you he probably would have bragged about.
Dave: Yeah, it's uh.. Harry Kremer, Now and Then Books ,bought one of the issues. There was two complete issue sales, #4 and #6, and I forget who the person was that bought the other complete issue, either at the time or shortly after it came out. Could have been Bruce Bergstrom, who was my art agent. That's a little bit later on, which is why I think it might not have been Bruce Bergstrom. Could have been somebody in the Midwest who just said, “Hey what would you charge me for a complete issue of ‘Cerebus’?” So there was the two sales that way the the prominence in that sense in that case is the estate of Harry Kremer was one of the complete issues Heritage did auction, the complete Issue Six, so I tend to think that Issue Six was the one that Harry had, and I don't know who had #4. But yeah, I've got the Darren Shan collection of comic art, the dedicated catalog for his collection. I don't think it's all of Darren's collection, I didn't even know his last name, I only knew that it was Darren in Ireland because all of my contacts with him were indirect. And I don't think this is all of his artwork that he owned, but it looks like Heritage cherry picked, this is what he said “I'd be interested in auctioning this stuff and I would like a catalog dedicated to my collection” and Heritage went through with a slide rule and went, “This is the stuff that we could picture doing a separate catalog. This is the stuff that, uh no, this would have to just go in a weekly auction or in one of the regular catalogs.” But they're definitely playing it up, they're playing it up big, because I've been getting Heritage catalogs for a good five or six years now probably, maybe even longer than that, and so I know what it is that they're saying with a page with the way that they're showing it and this is, one of the pages has the cover recreation and the 22 pages thumbnail size with a description and then the facing page has four of the pages enlarged, which means in Heritage language, “We're expecting big things from that. We're expecting a big sale because we're dedicating two pages to this” and if they weren't expecting big bucks, then it would be, “Here's the top page, here's the splash page, here's you can see that we've done a computer simulation to show 22 pages underneath it and this is all stuck in down in one quarter of the page, which means it'll bring in some money but it's not going to bring in enough money for us to dedicate two pages to it. “ There is really the only sky or no higher that you would get of Heritage Auctions composing it in the catalog, would be what they did with I think was “Journey into Mystery” #108 in the latest auction, where it's the complete issue #108 Thor story, and because it's Jack Kirby and I think Vince Colletta, they broke it up into individual pages. Here's page one you can bid on page one, here's page two you can bid on page two, then there was a back up five page “Tales of Asgard” story and that one they did the five page treatment on, “You're buying all five pages and bidding on those but the others are individual pages which is a testament to Jack Kirby, you know, at the time of ‘Journey into Mystery’ #108 and this is probably the only guy where if we had a complete story we'd still auction the pages individually because that's how much Jack Kirby's pages go for.” So…
Matt: We asked on the Facebook group, why this auction wasn't going to be 23 individual lots, and the guy from Heritage came back with, “This is the way they want to sell it. Like, qw kind of suggested hey you could make a lot more breaking it up and nope it's going to be sold as a complete package.”
Dave: Yeah! Yeah. I would dispute that myself, I would say, no, I think you're always going to make more money auctioning the pages individually. But I think Heritage is, [laughs] they're the guys that have have the history on this and they're the guys who have figured out everything you know digitally and by algorithm and on slide rules as to, “No, this is counter-intuitive for the buyer but this is this is how it actually works best for Heritage Auctions” and you just have to take it as an article of faith that that is true, because if there was if there was a way to make more money off of this, Heritage Auctions would definitely go for that, because that's what they're there for, that's what auction houses are there for, is to go, “If you want to make the absolute most money off of this, even giving us a healthy cut, this is how we do it and this is the stuff we know we know, this is the stuff we know.” So there you go! It's interesting, I was also looking at, okay, what happens with all of this free-floating Cerebus money if the Issue Four, like you say, just just goes through the roof and we were left in the dust on the first two bids, and there was four other bids after that, that were all orders of magnitude higher than any amount of money that we could come up with. And then the next, like looking at this chronologically, and according to the clock, the next one is the regular Heritage Auction catalog has got two pages from Issue Nine and that's going to be auctioned the same day, Thursday, but starting at three o'clock in the afternoon as opposed to 1:30 in the afternoon for Darren Shan, and then the Cerebus #1 pages that Darren Shan had, and I think there's three of them, those don't actually auction until Sunday.
Matt: Yeah, I bid on all three of them, and I got blown out of the water. I mean, it was one of those, they were token bids of, well let's see what'll happen, and it was I bid on it, within two hours it was, yeah you're outbid, and I'm like I'm not gonna chase that.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, I think 14 days ahead of time, you're looking at hockey stick curve, unless you're willing to climb the hockey stick all the way up up to the black tape.
Matt: And this was 19 days when they first went up, I'm like okay I'm gonna have that 20 minutes of I'm winning this auction and then, I mean, I've only put in like 150 bucks like I knew as soon as I bid I'm like this is gonna go bye-bye as soon as somebody gets off of work and checks their email.
Dave: What is it up to now? Are you following this?
Matt: I haven't looked, I think a couple grand per page, it might be like three or four?
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: I mean, I asked the Dark Treaders, “Okay, if we lose this do we want to go after one of the pages from Issue One?” And it was, “Nehh, you know, no.” And I'm like, “well you know I'm just asking!”
Dave: What’s that?
Matt: I asked the guys for the Number Four auction, like okay if we lose Number Four do we want to go after any of the other pages that are up? And there was, “Yeah, no,” and I'm like, well hey, I perfectly understand that. I mean 22 pages, there's a chance we can split this up, and make people you know, okay you get a page and you get a page and you know we're all going to fight over the page with uh you know the J Michael Straczynski status boy status page. But it’s one of those, if it's just like page two of Issue One, yeah nobody's gonna be happy whatever we do with it if we won it.
Dave: Right, right. And I feel like an idiot because it was a Mid-Ohio Con, the one where Gerhard and I did the Cerebus as a ninja with the dragon piece and auctioned it there, and a guy came up to me literally when I was just walking through the dealer's room and said, “Mr Sim, I have a question for you. Are you interested in buying pages from ‘Cerebus’ #1?” And I went, “Uhh, why do you ask?” and it's like he opened up this portfolio and pulled out I think four or five pages and said, “I've got these pages from Issue One. Would you be interested in buying them? I want…” and I don't know what the specific price was, but it was probably $500, $600? And it's like, “Are you kidding?! $600 for pages from #1? You're dreaming with your eyes open, buddy!” So not only did I sell them for 10 bucks, I could have had them again for a fraction of what they're going for now. So just goes to show. Just goes to show.
Matt: Okay, so there's a guy I follow on Twitter who's big into comics, and he shared a tweet and it's a picture of “Amazing Fantasy” 15, it was a couple of the key Marvel Silver Age books. and then he had an “Action” #1 and I think a “Detective” #27 in this picture, and the tweet was, “I found these comics at a garage sale and I got them all for five bucks a piece. What do you think?” And it was obvious he was joking, he didn't actually do it you know, but it was just to get people. They're gonna click on the tweet going, “Wait a minute, there's no way he did this” and my response was, “That book is clearly labeled 10 cents, you got ripped off.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] You overpaid, buddy! That's like 500 times, a thousand times! My math is terrible, but yeah, you got taken to the cleaner.
Matt: So I mean, yeah, you sold them for $10, you could have gotten them for 500, but the smart response would have been, “Well I sold them for 10, so I'll give you 20.”
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: No sense of getting ripped off by yourself!
Dave: Right. Okay, we're moving on to the Randy Duncan. “Mr Sim, Matt Smith, Paul Levitz and I are working on collecting permission for the 150 plus images in the third edition of ‘Power of Comics’. We would like to reuse two panels from ‘Cerebus’ #46 that we used in the previous edition. The permission form is attached. Please provide information for the sections in red, sign and date, and return to DuncanR at hsu.edu period. If you include your mailing address on the form, you will receive a complimentary copy of the published book.” Which I made sure to do. I did sign the form. That's one of those things that is just a personal bugaboo [laughs] for Dave Sim that I've never sued anybody for using anything of “Cerebus” in a raw material for a creative work or for a work scholarship, which this is, and anytime that somebody sends me a permission form and I sign it, I feel like I'm undercutting my own legal argument by signing this, because somebody's going to say, “See? Dave Sim actually did believe that you have to sign these permission forms, so he didn't believe in Cerebus as an open source thing.” And that's the rock and the hard place of, I don't want to prevent you from from using something of mine that you think you need to use, but if the publisher that you're working for says, “We need signed permissions for anything that we use” that effectively that's what I'm doing by not signing the permission form. I'm hoping that that's evolving at this point, because I think we will get much better scholarship and we will get much more effectively produced works if you take it as a default setting that if you're using it for scholarship, or using it as a raw material in another creative work, you don't have to ask somebody's permission to use it. I mean the outfit is is not that big. It's uh… where are they here? Bloomsbury Academic is the publishers, an academic division of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. It sounds to me like it's a publisher that's just large enough to be able to afford to keep a lawyer on retainer, or a couple of lawyers on retainer, and they're listening to their lawyers and this is what their lawyers are telling them, and that seems at odds to me again with good effective creativity, and good effective scholarship. At one time I was the only person that thought that way, but i think the internet is is driving us in a far more sensible direction, so hopefully I won't be getting these kind of permission forms too too more often, because I don't think people do that anymore. I don't think people sue because somebody used something that they own. It’s like, there's people that ask permission, and there are people who just go, “This is difficult enough to put together without having to get bogged down in all of these legalisms.” I'm off of that team personally, and I'm over on the Dave Sim open source team. Generation by generation, I think it'll change. What do you think?
Matt: Well, when I got the email, my first response when I saw it was, I was gonna respond, “Dave isn't gonna sue. He believes as long as you're using Cerebus in another creative work, you know, it's okay. It's approved. He doesn't need to sign anything, you know.” And then I thought, ehh, Paul Levitz, this is a guy that ran DC for how many years, he's going to be very much a cross T’s, dotted I’s, you know, “If you don't want to sign, then we're cutting you out of the book” and the two panels getting used is that's two more panels of “Cerebus” that somebody that may or may not know Cerebus might see it, so it's kind of sort of an advertising thing, and I'm like, yeah, no, I need to send this to Dave just doing my due diligence of, “Hey I got this in, this is something that Dave should look at,” and then Eddie sent me an email of, “Oh I already sent that to Dave,” and I'm like, okay, well he's getting two copies because you know..
Dave: Right.
Matt: It's better to send it and go, “Oh okay, we have two” then not send it and then the next thing you know we're getting you know frantic letters of, “The books at the printer, could you please sign? The books at the binder, we really need his signature!” And, “Oh we got the pulp this book because you didn't sign.”
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: I mean, it's one of those, every time this kind of stuff comes up and it's like. “Dave's not gonna sue you. He's okay with this, but I will let him know you asked, but I'm telling you that it's okay.” This time I didn't do it, I'm like, I know this looks more official than normal and more official than normal means let's just… you know, now that we've talked I will send Randy an email going, “Hey, you know Dave signed it. I'm sure he sent it back or either faxed to me or faxed it to him or whatever. It'll get there, but go ahead, don't worry about Dave coming down from Canada with pitchforks and and torches ready to torch the place because you used two panels from an issue of ‘Cerebus’.”
Dave: Actually, he had the the address in the fax, so I actually sent it back by mail. It's like, what the heck, I'm the only person on the planet that signs these things and actually sends back the piece of paper with the signature on it.
Matt: You know the sad part is because you use the mail they're not going to get it in time. [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, well… no, the publication schedule was like January 2023 or something like that. Even the US Postal Service, even at its worst, I think can get this to them, you know, through sleet or hail or storm or dark of night. Um, okay, that's I think as much time as we want to give that one.
Which brings up to Mark. And Mark asks… axes me… Uh actually he axes you, “Hi, I was just on your ‘A Moment of Cerebus’ website. Thank you for putting so much work into it. It really shows,” and since you've developed all of these technological chops for doing a much better Please Hold for Dave Sim, let's really push the boundaries of your learning curve and when I read that part where it says, “Thank you for putting so much work into it. It really shows,” can we plug in a standing ovation?
Matt: I can try?
Dave: A standing ovation and I was thinking fireworks over top of it, as well, because it's, you're still not going to get paid for doing A Moment of Cerebus, but the very least you can get is a public domain standing ovation and a public domain fireworks for yourself.
Ghostly CrowDave: [Applause]
Matt: I'm trying to remember it, I swear there's a panel in “Guys” where Cerebus and the guys are all like, “Yay!”
Dave: Uh, yeah! Yeah that's actually in “Flight”, I think, or you can use the one from “High Society” where everybody's cheering Cerebus’ campaign speech. That would work, as well.
Matt: That is “Flight.” That's “Welcome to the seventh or eighth sphere” the first false one or second false one.
Dave: Right. Right. Okay!
Matt: Can't tell you what I had for breakfast two days ago, but I can tell you that!
Dave: There you go . Okay, Mark continues, “I tried linking to the selfie store so as to acquire a PDF of Dave's out of print work ‘Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing’. Unfortunately the page appears to no longer exist!” That's one of those internet things. I remember way back when I actually used the internet, and it would say, this page no longer exists, and I would think, how do you do that? I don't want to know how you do that. “I'm wondering if you might suggest another way to acquire a copy of the Guide. I've searched high and low online to no avail! Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Mark.” And then you say, “Which ties into something Eddie sent me after last month: Hey, Matt! Rolly usually sends me a complete list of the AV inventory every few months. Last time he checked, there was [laughs] 1140 “Collected Letters 2004”, 13 “Ultimate Guide to Self-Publishing” which has the ‘Cerebus smashing through the wall’ shot as the wraparound cover, and 12 “Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing” which has Cerebus at the drawing board trying to picture what time it is before he looks at the clock. As well as the trades Aardvark-Vanaheim has on hand. These are the older, unmastered ones. Recent printings like “Swords of Cerebus in Hell?” and some older signed copies of the trades. Here's some of the rarer items”, and go through the list on that. I don't know if that's been updated since David Birdsong ran the Kickstarter for “Pieces of Turtles 8” #1 because he listed a bunch of those and I think the signed and numbered ones went pretty quickly. So the rule of thumb at Aardvark-Vanaheim is, if there's only three of them, then that's those are Cerebus Archive copies. I don't like to get below three. If there's more than three, if you really really want them, and you haven't been able to find them, then I'm always open for offers. I'm always put in mind of Mick Jagger at the concert they did at the El Mocambo Club in Toronto that was on, I think it was “Love You Live”, where he's introducing the members of the band. I think he said, about Charlie Watts, “He's open for offers! I wouldn't say he's exactly up for grabs, but he's open for offers!” And that's really what the situation is with anything in the Cerebus Archive, or the Aardvark-Vanaheim inventory, that's over the number of three. I wouldn't say it is it's exactly up for grabs, but it's open for offers! And that would be the case here with you, Mark! In terms of, if you've looked high and low and you can't find it, and you really really want it, just be completely honest with yourself and go, “What would I be happy paying for this?” Not Happy Dave's Bargain Basement price, but if I've been looking high and low for this online if I found it someplace, then I went, “Oh, that's a good price. That's about what I would be happy paying for this, just to get this done so that I can actually have a copy of it”, then in that case just pay that amount at CerebusDownloads.com and let Eddie Khanna know that that's what you're paying for, and give Eddie your mailing address and Eddie will let us know, “Okay, this person wants this, this person wants this other thing over here, and this is what they're paying for it.” Obviously, we can do much better for selling somebody a PDF of the “Cerbeus Guide to Self-Publishing”. I mean I could do that next Thursday with Rolly! “Here, I downloaded this off of my laptop onto a thumb drive. You download it onto your smartphone and you email it to the guy tonight when you get home, and it's a done deal.” But I don't want to quote a price, because that's another thing that I'm trying to train people into, is think like what Mick Jagger was saying, “It's not up for grabs, but it's open for offers” and just make an offer that will make you happy, and if it makes you happy, it makes me happy, and then we can make you happy with whatever it is that you're looking for. If you were looking for a PDF because you couldn't find anything else, and now you find out, okay, now there are “Ultimate Guide to Self-Publishing” copies, not a lot of them. “Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing copies, not a lot of them, how much more would you pay for one of those than a PDF? If you're just looking for the content, and it's like, “Well I'm not going to pay more for a relatively rare book then I would pay for a PDF because I just want to read the damn thing, I'll get it in the form of an email and print it out on my printer, and I've got the ‘Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing’ as far as I'm concerned.” As opposed to, “I'm a Cerebus collector, and I want a original printing of the ‘Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing’.” So that's one of those, we don't get a lot of response that way, because people would always rather that you say, “This is what I'm charging” and then the situation you get into is, “Wow! I would have paid five times that!” and it's like, “Well then, stop asking me the cold prices because you're always getting a much better price than I could have possibly have gotten. If you were just being honest with yourself and saying, “Well I didn't know that they had these, I would pay this much for one of those.” That way Aardvark-Vanaheim makes more money than Aardvark-Vanaheim would the other way, and that's what we're trying to figure out how to do, to make Aardvark-Vanaheim more money.
Matt: Okay, three things I thought of while you were talking. One, whatever they're willing to pay for physical media, whatever price they want to throw at you, maybe add 20 bucks for shipping. [laughs]
Dave: Yes! 20 bucks is a given in this day and age. I can't believe that I've lived long enough to reach the point where $20 for postage is a given, sending anything larger than an envelope or a postcard. Console yourself, Mark, if you're in the United States somewhere, that's $20 Canadian, which would probably be about $16 US, depending on the exchange rate. So that's one of the things you thought of, the next one?
Matt: I think, now that you mentioned PDFs of the Guide, I think CerebusDownloads is offering PDFs of the “Guide to Self-Publishing, the Ultimate Guide”, I think it's on the regular page where the other 16 volumes are listed. I will double check and I will email Mark back of, “If you want it digitally, there's a button for that, I believe.”
Dave: There's a button for that! How often do we get to say that in this day and age?
Matt: And the third thing I thought of is, how many “Fight Like an Aardvark” bumper stickers does the archive have?
Dave: Ah, that's a good question. I do have a few of them.
Matt: Okay, the reason I ask is because Nate Oberstein sent me five of them that he didn't know what to do with, and I've kind of been sitting on them in the AMoC prize drawer of, “Okay, you know if we decide to have a stupid contest, here's a stupid contest prize that's actually kind of nice!” But if you needed some, I would send them up, but if you don't need them then I'll hang on to them.
Dave: Uh, I've definitely got more than three. So I'm okay for those. Are are they all curled up like mine?
Matt: No, they're flat!
Dave: Are they?! Mine are all curled up! The adhesive just couldn't stand sitting out in the open air. I should have put them under something heavy decades ago.
Matt: Nate made it sound like he was at a convention or something and somebody had like a hundred of them…
Dave: Really?
Matt: And he bought a bunch of them, and you know, traded them, sold them, whatever in it, and he was going through stuff and he had these five and he's like, “Hey Matt, you want these to use a surprise on A Moment of Cerebus?” I'm like, yeah sure I'll find a use for them, and he sent them, and I opened the package, and went, “These are really neat!” And then I put them in the bottom of the prize drawer, which is actually a physical drawer now. I cleaned off a drawer on my desk and put, okay here's things when I need to give somebody something neat in a package. You know, here's some postcards from the Waverly, here's these five stickers, there's… I don't know! There's, at one point when I was cleaning off the desk, a lot of stuff went, “Oh this is prize drawer stuff” and every now and then I think I should open that up and double check, “Maybe I need that fax!”
Dave: Right, right. Okay, I think that that's got that covered.
Matt: Yeah that's pretty covered.
Dave: Okay, all right. Yes! You're at complete liberty to make somebody happy with a “Fight Like an Aardvark” bumper sticker.
Matt: I gotta find a use yet.
Dave: What’s that?
Matt: I gotta find a contest or something where I have to get rid of them. Right now, like I said, they're just sitting in the drawer, and I'm okay with that because you know I am a Cerebus hoarder.
Dave: Right, right.
Okay, that moves on to Dion Turner who asks, “G'day Mate!” or rather “G’day Matt, Question for Dave (or at least an idea for discussion). Great news of the '82 Tour book, it's very cool that this sort of historical project is spinning out of the relationship with Waverly Press. Don't get me wrong, the remastered issues and phonebooks are great, and I hope they continue. But this type of book with rarities and items from that era will be a cool time capsule.” Yes, I'm hoping that A, that's what it will be, is a cool time capsule, and B, that people will agree with us that that's a good idea as opposed to, “Why are you wasting your time doing something like this when you could do the next remastered trade paperback and next remastered hardcover?”
That ties in with a couple of photos, which is turning into a weekly thing, with Rolly coming in on Thursday, this week's Off-White House photos are me standing on the stairs in the entryway to the Off-White House and holding up two things that I forgot to get Rolly to scan and email to Dagon for the 82 Tour Book, because they're framed and on the wall, and one of them is a picture of me with Harlan Ellison, framed with Harlan Ellison's letter to me on his amazing classy Harlan Ellison stationery from the time period. So I'm holding up that in its frame, and the other one is the “Too Close for Comfort” letter from producer Arnie Sultan when I wrote to him saying that they were doing stuff wrong on “Too Close for Comfort” with Ted Knight as the cartoonist, and would he be interested in meeting with me when we were going to be in Los Angeles on the 82 Tour, and he wrote back and said, “Yeah that sounds great, just, you know, phone the office and make an appointment. Let us let us know when you're going to be here.” So I've got the the letter framed and two pictures of Deni and I with Ted Knight on the set of “Too Close for Comfort.” And talked to Rolly about that today, going, “Do I want to send that to just Dagon or to Matt as well?” And it's like, uh, well, we want to promote the 82 Tour Book, but at the same time we don't want to give away too much of the 82 Tour Book. But at the same time, the 82 Tour Book is way off in the future, so people are apt to go, “Wow that's really cool!” when they see it on A Moment of Cerebus and then completely forget about it until the 82 Tour Book comes in, and go, “Wow that's right! I saw that somewhere, I don't remember where it was, but here it is again, but now I've got it in this in this book sitting in front of me.” So I think I decided to have Rolly email the pictures to you for Please Hold and A Moment of Cerebus and if I didn't, let Rolly know that I changed my mind on that one.
Matt: Well, the other… the Harlan Ellison picture of the two of you together is on the site from an old post where… because, that's when I got the email about, “Okay we're doing the 82 Tour Book. You know, is there anything readily at hand?” I went through and went, okay, there's gotta be stuff and there's the Harlan Ellison thing… uh, trying to remember what else I sent Dagon. Because I also included Rolly on the email because I have a folder that I sent him that I'm sure he's going to bring to you that's got scans of “The Comics Journal” 82 and 83 interviews, scans of “The Comic Scene” #8 interview with you and Deni, because I only have part one I don't have #9 with which has part two that's also from 82, and then “Comics Fandom Forum”, I have no idea what issue number. Guy on Facebook had, “A bunch of interviews with Dave!” and physical media that he doesn't need anymore, was anybody interested, and I offered him like 30 bucks and he sent it to me and these are… He took “The Comics Journal” interview, the two issues, cut everything that wasn't the interview out, and then stapled them together with the wraparound cover so that it's 82 on the back, 83 on the front, and it's just “This is just Dave.” And “The Comics Fandom Forum”, it was the same thing, it was an interview from July 1982 at the Chicago Comic Con that Maggie Thompson and fans did with you. I've never heard of it. It was in this stack, I'm like, hey that's 1982, so I scanned that and made sure to get that to Dagon so that I'm getting raw materials as I find them. So I should have a copy of the Harlan Ellison picture, and then the Ted Knight pictures, I know I've seen them somewhere and I can't remember off the top of my head if it was an issue of “Cerebus” at the end when you were going through the archives starting to put the archive together, or if that wasn't an issue of “Following Cerebus.”
Dave: That was actually an episode of CerebusTV, which makes it very very hard to get the images. I think that's the only time that I showed those images. They're very funny, because Ted Knight is completely dressed in white, and with the lighting it's like he glows in the dark because he's Ted Knight! Once you're shooting his white shirt and his teeth and his hair, [laughs] there's really not a lot of Ted Knight that you can see besides that. One of my favourite stories was explaining to him why the name Ted Knight was important to me when I was uh, that the first time that I knew of him was from the Superman Aquaman cartoon show, because he was listed as one of the voice actors and Ted Knight was the alter ego of Starman in the comics. And that was me going, wow, there's a voice actor who's got the same name as the alter ego of Starman! Which tells you how old I was when those came out. I think I was about 10. And I finished this long-winded explanation and Ted Knight went, “Oh, I remember that! Aquaman, king of the seven seas with [jibberish] Aqualad! [jibberish]” And he rattled it off word perfect and I'm going, that's amazing. That's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. This is 1982 and he did that voiceover in 1966, and he still knew it word perfect. And there's a great hook, “Aquaman! King of the seven seas!”
Anyway, getting back getting back to Dion, sorry Dion we're digressing here. Oh! Another digression, when you're mentioning “The Comic Scene” interview. they had a professional photographer when Deni and I were being interviewed at their office in New York. And of the two photos, one photo of me, the other one of Deni ended up being in this file of the 82 Tour Book, so Dagon's got that as well. Those are two of the best photographs of Deni and me definitely from the time period.
“Something that popped into my head after the last 'Please Hold' is the current popularity of 'Artists Editions' books reprinting the original art at it's original size. The Archive Portfolios have done this with the earliest pages from each book that are still in the archive (Which is great! We Cerebus fans have an embarrassment of riches in those portfolios).” Thank you! I’ll take that as a compliment.
“What might the chances be for a separate 'Artist's Edition' book with pages that fall outside of what is in the Archive Portfolios? Pages which you might have something to say about (influences, techniques, style?) in adjacent essays - or just put in the pages that you would think benefit most from being printed as the original art. The most interesting ones I've seen are where you can see the different layers, types of ink/brush/pen and those fine little lines that no-one else would ever see (Neal Adams lines!).” Which, yes, that’s a classic Neal Adams line I’ll certainly never forget. When I was talking to him in Niagara Falls about the reproduction of his art in newspapers at the time when he was doing the Ben Casey strip and he said, “The really fine lines I did for myself.” And it's like, yeah, you kind of have to, and it's like, thank you for doing that, because you had no idea that 50, 60 years later, not only would Heritage Auctions get those originals and be selling them, but it would be possible for Kevin H in Denton to go to Heritage Auctions and go, “Oh, here's a Ben Casey strip. Let's scan this 1200 dpi.” So, you did it for yourself at the time, Neal, but you actually did them for posterity as well and thank you very much for that.
Dion goes on, “It becomes very forensic. Technically satisfying which adds to the appreciation of the beauty of the work. Now absolutely that's not a cheap item, oversized as far as books go. The paper quality needs to be top notch and we know how those prices are changing month to month. Postage would be a nightmare, I know this better than most.” [laughs] Yeah, Dion's in Australia, and what we were just saying about whatever you're moving around North America is going to cost you 20 bucks, If you're sending it to Australia by any method and it's larger than an envelope it's going to be a hundred bucks.
“So that likely impacts on the number of pages. But maybe Waverly Press would have a feel on what the sweet spot might be? Like the Cover Art Treasury, I could see this becoming something comic stores want to get on their shelves. All the best to you both, Dion.” Okay, moving backward through that, the Cover Art Treasury and something the comic stores want to get on their shelves? That's kind of out of the question because the cost per unit of getting the kind of book that you're talking about, the Artists Editions, done, if I’m going to sell those through Diamond Comics and then Diamond is going to sell them to the stores, you have to start with 60% off and then you have to say the cost per unit just to print the books and do the production on it, is meaning you're probably talking about a $75, $100 book at cost. And then you have to factor in 60% off for Diamond so you're already talking about a $300 book before you've even figured out how much Aardvark-Vanaheim is going to make and my rule of thumb has tended to be I want to make at least whatever Diamond is making and at least whatever the printer is making. So you're adding another $200, so you're already up to 600 and, okay, what's the demand going to be? And as you say, then you have to tack on the shipping on top of that, everybody's cut being equal. So that tends to rule that out. What you're really talking about is the Aardvark-Vanaheim hardcovers, not the Waverly Press hardcovers. The Aardvark-Vanaheim hardcovers, there have only been two of them. Physically two hardcovers, two books which were purchased by a patron in Massachusetts who had basically pitched me on the idea of, “Yes I would like something like this” and I said okay, I really don't want to get into this. So partly to deal with the situation and partly to get this off of my desk and hopefully never have it on my desk again, you're talking about a $10,000 US hardcover, and he ended up being interested. I forget which two books that he got, which was all of the pages in the Cerebus Archive of, I'm tempted to say “Flight” and “Guys”. I might be remembering that wrong. And what happened was, okay, here's how many pages that's going to be. All of those pages have been scanned. Sean has them, so because you're buying this one book, now we get into the spectrum of options on a book like that. I can do a book that pleases me which would be on slick paper, most people prefer flat paper. What we can do is send you Cerebus pages on different kinds of paper, and you look at it and go, ”This is the paper that I prefer” so that's what we will print it on. Then you also get into, do you want it to look like… you know, we've all seen the Artists Editions books. Do you want it done in such a way that it's dark enough to show every stain and blotch and erased line in full relief, or do you want it closer to a remastered version where all of that stuff is cleaned up, or do you want it halfway in between, three quarters of the way in between, a quarter of the way in between? So again, same situation. Sean mocked up, “Here's a Cerebus page, and here's version A, B, C, D, E. You tell me what density you prefer of the remastering process, and that's what I will do for your books.” Bottom line, it ended up taking about two years to get the books done to this person's complete 100% satisfaction. “This is exactly what I wanted, that I pictured in my mind and far more specifically than that you've actually incarnated it at levels that I couldn't even have imagined when we started talking about this, and now I've got this slipcase book that is exactly to my personal taste for Artists Editions.” So we've got one person who is interested in Strange Death of Alex Raymond in that form, and is interested in Strange Death of Alex Raymond”'s greatest hits. “These are the ones I consider the most jaw-dropping pages that I would like to have” and the other alternative is, “Okay what would it cost me for the first 50 pages? The first 60 pages?” And this person didn't want Carson's pages. Nothing against Carson's pages, they just wanted my pages. Okay, well if you're buying a $10,000 book, that's no problem! You can pick your pages. You can pick stuff out of “Glamourpuss”. This person is also a huge “Glamorpuss” fan, so it's like okay, you can get this many Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, or you can have fewer Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages and these “Glamourpuss” greatest hits. “These are my favorite model pictures. These are my favorite parody pages from ‘Glamourpuss’. So I would like these in the front of the book and then leading into Strange Death of Alex Raymond.” So they're still at the point of going, “What does my ideal book look like?”
Now bringing this back to you, Dion, on the assumption that $10,000 US is probably completely out of your wheelhouse, this brings us back to Mick Jagger. “I wouldn't say it's up for grabs, but I say it's open for offers.” So anybody listening to this who is going, “$10,000 US is a big spend for me. I don't think there's anybody on the planet where $10,000 US isn't a big spend for them, but you've given me something to think about, to say okay you know, you wouldn't want an Artists Edition book that's much longer than say 100 pages or something like that? What would I want in my ideal book?” Which takes it out of the category of a general interest book. Possibly taking it out of that category, but maybe not completely out of that category, in terms of, if you say you know, “Just blue skying it on A Moment of Cerebus, here's my ideal book that I may have to save up my pennies for a couple of years, but it's gonna take a couple of years for this to get done as a process. Anybody else want to go in on this and live with my ideal version that has these Cerebus Archive pages?” Could be “Cerebus”, it could be “Glamourpuss”, could be Strange Death of Alex Raymond, could be the Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages from “Glamourpuss”, could be “Zootanapuss”. You mentally put together your favorite 100 pages or 150 pages or whatever it is, and I'm open for offers. Make me an offer on it. It's a lot of work. It's more work for Sean than it is for me, but it's still a lot of work to say, okay, this is all stuff that has been scanned. I paid for the scanning, Aardvark-Vanaheim has paid for the scanning. These scans exist. Sean has to be paid for his time. But that's really what you're talking about, is a format like that, and again bringing us back to Mick Jagger, he's open for offers! If you want to come up with a Cerebus Archive portfolio, as an example, and this is something I'm working on mentally because I think I definitely have to do a Cerebus Archive portfolio special. Cerebus Archive number 10 and number 11 won't be the sequential ones that we're talking about. There will be the “Cerebus” #4 Remastered, probably two-sided, so that I can get 10 pages of “Cerebus” #4 in the portfolio and a couple of pages of commentary and split up the #4 into two books. This is an exceptional circumstance, I think everybody is jazzed about all 22 pages and commentaries, so that's one of those, in terms of general interest Kickstarter, how much money will this make? Probably it'll make the most amount of money for Aardvark-Vanaheim, but again Mick Jagger, I'm open for offers. If you go, “These are the 10 pages that I would most like to have in a Cerebus Archive style portfolio with this illustration on the front.” You're not going to get it for $100 because it's a lot of work and it is being specially tuned to you, but make me an offer on these 10 pages. This page from “Guys”, this page from “High Society”, this page from “Church and State.” All of these are in the Cerebus Archive and have been scanned, and we'll be happy to work with you. Again make me an offer, I don't want to quote you a price and have you go, “Wow that's so cool! I would have paid five times that!” It's like, no, you tell me. This is something that you want that I'm not doing that you want to get me doing, so you have to make the offer. You have to say, “This is how much I'd be willing to pay for these 10 pages, for these 20 pages, Cerebus Archive portfolio style, and I'll be the only one that gets these.” And again, you can go on A Moment of Cerebus and say, “It's going to be cheaper for Dave to do 10 of these, so instead of this amount of money that I would have to pay to just have this one be my one and only, if I can get three or four other people that go, ‘yeah, that's cool! I would like one of those and we're all willing to pay this much money. Then we will go ahead on that.’” That's as specific as I can be about this, I think.
Matt: And the thing people have to remember is, it's what's in the Archive. So if you want the death of Death from “Flight”, that page got sold. And, two pages before? Yes. A couple pages after? Sure. But that physical page is gone and you have to understand that when you say, “I want this page.” It might not be available.
Dave: Right, or it might be. Just because it's not in the Cerebus Archive doesn't mean that Sean doesn't have it as part of the Cerebus Art Hunt collection, which is much larger than the Cerebus Archive. That one, you have to check with Sean. “This is a page that I would like to have.” Some of the people who were very kind and generous to scan the page and send it to Cerebus Art Hunt said, “I just want this as part of the remastering process for the trade paperbacks. I consider this page my page and I don't want people having an exact copy of my page.” Not a lot of people that did that, but there are people that did that. So that's another thing that you would have to check, which is again, this is why you're going to be paying the big bucks for this, because it's a long process that starts way way way back here and you're probably six months in before you even start talking about, “Okay, now we're ready to start putting this together.”
Matt: The analogy I'm going to use, and I'm going to bring up whatever this comes up, is you're not hiring your cousin's friend's band to play the Rolling Stones, you're hiring the Rolling Stones.
Dave: [laughs] That's right! When you're doing that, it's like there's a world of difference between, “I wouldn't exactly say he's up for grabs, but he's open for offers.” It's like it's Charlie Watts. [laughs] Picture how much money Charlie Watts had… well, he doesn't have money now, he’s dead. But when you’re talking about “open for offers”, you’d better make it a Charlie Watts-sized offer.
Matt: And for doing an archive of the Issue Four scans, my idea if we win the auction, because I was gonna pay for the prints of everybody gets prints of everything. I was calling it Cerebus Archive 1.4.
Dave: [laughs] That's a good way to look at it, as well.
Matt: I mean, yeah, you're talking about making it 10 and 11, well if you just make it 1.4 and 1.4.2. That way it doesn't throw the numbering off for the people that are… because, we're all anal retentive comic fans. Some of us are going to be going, “You're starting to do that Marvel legacy numbering and we hate you.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Okay, well… [slap] bad cartoonist! I've slapped my own hand because i had no… I still have no idea what you're talking about, but I know, “Don't do that!” And I promise we won't do that.
Matt: To illustrate how insane comic book numbering is, Kurt Busiek and Neil Gaiman and a few other famous big name creators teased that they had a project coming. And everybody on Twitter was, “Oh it could be this or this” and they finally announced what it was, Marvel Comics sometime this year is going to publish “Amazing Fantasy” 1000.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: A 60th, or it's next year, it's 2023 because it's the six--, or you know what, it is this year. It’s the 60th anniversary of the first appearance of the Amazing Spider-Man, and everybody went, “Those numbers don't work.” Even if, you know, anything you try to do to explain how you reach #1000 for a comic from 1962. If it was monthly? Nope, doesn't work. If you're adding in the original “Amazing Fantasy” numbers with the Spider-Man numbers? It doesn't work. You're just making shit up.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And we know you're making it up! And of course everybody's going, “But we're still going to buy the book because it's going to have Neil Gaiman working on Spider-Man. It's going to have all these creators, big name artists, big name writers doing stories in this oversized anniversary issue.” And I saw it and went, that is so dumb! I kind of want to do “Cerebus” 1000 just because, hey if the numbers don't matter we can put any number we want on there.
Dave: Right. Which you've already done with “The Adventures of Cerebus” #500.
Matt: Well no, that's a specific callback to what I assumed was going to happen, which is I'm going to buy 10 of these and everyone else is going to have bought 10. So now I'm going to have seven copies that I can't necessarily sell like the first one, within a week all of them were gone. This one, I think it's gonna be a year from now and I’ll be going, well you know I still got a couple copies on hand. And it's just like “Superman” 75 when he died, and “Adventures of Superman” 500 when he came back. Everybody bought the comeback book, going, “Oh you know this is going to be rarer than hen’s teeth!” It’s like, they printed two billion of them!
Dave: [laughs] I had no idea what the reference was. Thank you. Now I know now. Now I know what “Adventures of Cerebus” #500 meant. I just live to serve. I'm just the right hand with the Sharpie. You tell me what you want to say, and I'll put it on there because you're paying good money for these.
Matt: I mean it very much goes back to the Cerebus appearance in “Tales of the Silverfish”, where you walk up to grandpa and scream “tree sketch” and see what happens!
Dave: [laughs] Right, right…
Matt: I mean…
Dave: Okay! All right. I think we've exhausted that one at this point. Maybe not.
Matt: We can go forever, but yes, we need to move on.
Dave: Okay. So, Nick asked, “Hello, I'm a longtime reader of your website and I just had a quick question. Is there any way to order the remastered edition of Reads? I have searched around and it doesn't seem to be available anymore as far as I can tell. If you can tell me anything about this it would be greatly appreciated! Thanks so much! Keep up the awesome work with the site.”Now that you’ve already got the standing O and the fireworks digital download, let's plug another one in there for Matt Dow!
[Thunderous Applause]
Dave: And there you go. There you go. And then you say, “So, wondering if Reads is still available through Diamond, or if it needs a new printing? Also, Nick where you at? I know a guy, but it depends on where you are…” And I went to my faxed Diamond, Aardvark-Vanaheim inventory that I get every week from Eddie Khanna, and thank you, Eddie. That's always helpful. And this the Diamond inventory for May 29, 2022, and looking down at “Reads” Remastered, there's 1750 of them. So if you've been going to a comic store and going, “Can you give me a copy of ‘Reads’?”, and they're telling you they're not available, I'm afraid they're lying. So all I can do is recommend going to another local comic store. I was going to check what the Diamond order code is for the Remastered “Reads”. I've got the original order code, but I don't think it's for the Remastered edition. So if you could plug that in at this point that would be the most helpful that I can be for you, Nick, on that, is all things being equal, any comic store should be able to order “Reads” and really any of the Cerebus trade paperbacks. Except for, and i'm gonna do a quick rundown here, “Form and Void” and “The Last Day” are both sold out.
Matt: “Form and Void”s a’comin’! One of these days!
Dave: It's getting closer. It's getting closer. Dagon asked me, “When am I going to get the numbers for the Aardvark-Vanaheim soft cover?” and I said, you'll know as soon as we know.” And then that was a plus for grabbing the inventory from last Sunday. The Remastered edition of “Form and Void” is actually on the inventory list, and I forgot to check for that when it came in. So it's entered as the number on hand is zero, because they haven't gotten them, but they have orders for a 106 of them as of Sunday. So we're getting closer to, at some point Diamond's gonna go, “Okay, this is how many we got orders for now. We want to fatten that up a little bit so that we have copies on hand.” And I'm guessing we're probably a week, maybe two weeks, away from a final number for Dagon that we can then give to Marquis so that it's, “Here's how many soft covers, here's how many hardcovers”, and then Marquis can start printing them. They're really backed up, so it's probably gonna be four weeks or five weeks until they actually are able to print the books. But this is the closest that we've been to having “Form and Void” back in print, so like I say “Form and Void”, “The Last Day” are both sold out. The books that have the smallest quantity right now where if you haven't got them and you want to get them, “Flight”, Diamond only has 15 right now. “Guys”, they only have 11. And “Latter Days” they have 73. Eddie always highlights those at the bottom of the page, “These are the potential problem children, but they're not problem children yet and they're not problem children right now.” So there you go. Everything else is well up in numbers. I mean, “Church and State” Remastered, 1700. Volume 2 Remastered, 373. “Melmoth”, 96. “Melmoth” isn’t a problem because we've still got “Melmoth” in stock. “Women”, 201. “Minds” 1619. So if you're buying Cerebus from your local comic book store and somebody starts giving you grief and saying, “No, they're not available”, just tell them, “No, I listened to Please Hold for Dave Sim on A Moment of Cerebus. Dave Sim was talking about it. He was giving actual numbers. These books actually exist. So talk to your Diamond rep.” Be polite, but say, “Talk to your Diamond rep and say these books do actually exist and I would really really like one of them.”
Matt: Good, because I think I need the Remastered “Minds”. I ordered it, and it never showed up, and I was like, aw don't tell me I missed it and it's gone. But they got a lot of them, then I'm just going to talk to my guy and be like, hey where's my book?
Dave: We should probably do this every month on Please Hold. Just say, these are the only problem children and if the book that you're looking for isn't on that list, then Diamond’s probably got a thousand of them, and they're not going to sell a thousand of them next week. So definitely keep trying at your local comic store..
Matt: I emailed Nick back and said where are you located? And he said Las Vegas, and I'm thinking they have stores in Las Vegas.
Dave: They definitely do. They got a bunch of stores.
Matt: Cause my backup was going to be Menachem at Escape Pod of, if Menachem doesn't have it, it might be out of print!
Dave: Right. Okay, moving on to, “Michael R. (who was the ONLY person to comment when I asked the peanut gallery where I should have Dave put the “Adventures of Cerebus #500” on my PoT8.2. He said front, so front it is. I already told Eddie, so it should be on the List that way.) “ It wasn't on the list but the post-it note that Rolly put on your copies, that was the only one that had the post-it note on the front. So grandpa going, okay I might be reading this wrong, but I think if the post-it note is on the front, then that means that's where Matt wanted that written. So basically you got it twice. You've got “Adventures of Cerebus” #500 number one out of seven, two out of seven, three out of seven, and the box signature on the front, Dave Sim 6/1/2022. And then I'm pretty sure I also signed them on the back, and put their actual number on the back. So you got it all covered there.
Matt: [laughs] Okay!
Dave: Aaaand… what was it? I'm sorry.
Matt: I said okay thank you!
Dave: Oh, you're quite welcome! You're quite welcome. We can handle these special orders. You know, have it your way at Burger King. “oh, right: “Michael R. the only one home in Easton, PA.” asks:
Hi Matt! I hope you had/have a wonderful Memorial weekend.” That was just this past weekend, right?
Matt: Yeah, I actually took off of work and spent time with the family, and scanned a bunch of stuff for Cerebus, because you know it's one of those, my mother-in-law was at the house. So watching TV was pretty much whatever she wanted to watch. So I'm like, I’m gonna sit the computer and do something that's “productive” but only in my mind.
Dave: And completely bypassing the Memorial Day weekend bucks that they were going to pay you at work?
Matt: Only two or three people signed up and it was one of these where I'm like, I've worked the past couple weekends. I'm like, no, no I'm gonna take this one off. Well, that's… so Saturday the girls had a birthday party they had to go to and Paula had to work, so I had to take them to the birthday party. So I couldn't work Saturday. Sunday, nobody really wanted to sign up to work, and then Monday, the girls were in the Memorial Day parade at nine o'clock in the morning, and it was like, there's no way to get to work, be productive enough to make money, and then get home in time to get to the parade. I'm like, nope, I'm just going to skip it this weekend.
Dave: And how about that! How about that.
Matt: I usually skip Memorial Day only because the girls march as Girl Scouts in the parade, so I have to go and take pictures, and it's kind of funny because my phone goes, “Hey you took pictures four years ago. You want to look at them?” And I'm like uh sure, and I look and one of one of them was Natasha was just young enough that she couldn't be in the parade, and her cousin was just young enough that she couldn't be in the parade, so I have a photo of the two of them with the Girl Scouts in the background where Janice is marching with Paula and I'm like, well that's kind of neat!
Dave: I would say. I would say. I mean you've got this whole Girl Scout history from Pre-Girl Scout to Girl Scout to Girl Scout veteran.
Matt: That’s… I’m hoping that I do…
Dave: And they’re both still knee-high to a grasshopper.
Matt: No, no, no, Janice is almost up to my mom's shoulder. My mom's 4’11”. So…
Dave: Oh my gosh! [laughs]
Matt: So yeah! Yeah. No, the old family… all my cousins, it was you were a little kid until you were taller than Betsy. [laughs]
Dave: Right, right. Four foot eleven…
Matt: The first time I got…
Dave: Okay all right, see Grandpa is still going, well these are still knee-high to a grasshopper. They don't they don't stay that size very long, Grandpa.
Matt: So… we went to visit my Aunt and Uncle, and they had kids late, and he's my youngest Uncle on my Dad's side so his kids were babies when I was 28. And so we went to visit, and there's my cousin Nicole and she's like 15 and a half, almost 16, and I'm going, no no no, she's like only a foot tall! It's like, no, it's you're not 28 anymore, Matt. You've got to remember, when you get older, they get older.
Dave: Yes yes and it happens faster and faster the older you get, where you're inclined to say to them, “Stop doing that!” [laughs] It's like, shrink back to the size that you're supposed to be! You're completely distorting reality and it's like, uhh no, the distorted reality is all inside your own head.
Anyway, getting back to Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania, “Hi Dave! I know now you're in the beginning stages with a possible 1982 U.S. TOUR 40th ANNIVERSARY BOOK, but has there been anything going on with possible CAN10 -Minds Kickstarter?” Um, it’s not “Minds”, is it? It’s uhh, 10 is “Guys”. Didn’t I already do “Minds”?
Matt: Lemme check the shelf, because it’s right here. All right. [light clattering] That’s that. [more clattering] That’s that. Come on, now! Oh sure, it's the bottom of the stack. Number nine is the last volume. Number nine was the last one you did. So then yeah, 10 would be “Guys”.
Dave: Okay! Got it. How'd it go, Grandpa! You got something right that Michael R didn't get right, which is really saying something. Yeah I pulled out the “Guys” pages. It's one of those, I gotta work out, there's logistics that I have to work out. There’s the amazing folders that we send these out in, we used up the last of those on CAN 9, so now I have to decide, am I going to get enough for CAN 10 and CAN 11? Which really fills up Camp David, I gotta tell you, even when they're flat, and filling up Camp David is sort of happening on its own now. So that's been delayed, while Rolly is waiting until a time when he can get his friend who helps out around Camp David in the warm weather to figure out a better way to store stuff back there, so that we have a little extra room. Part of me was going, well okay, do CAN 10 and just get enough folders printed to do CAN 10 so you don't have to store any of them, but that's kind of an ineffective use of resources. You've already got this guy that creates these boxes at Packaging Too, you're going to get a much better price for two Cerebus Archive portfolios worth rather than just one portfolio's worth. What you're really doing is waiting for Camp David to get a little more organized. That's not going to happen until summer sometime, so that keeps getting postponed. As far as I've gotten with it, is that I do have from the off-site storage the first 10 pages from “Guys” and I have looked at them, and have pictured, okay what is it that I'm going to be saying about these? And I have a ballpark of that in my mind, but going ahead on it? It makes more sense right now to be doing the “Pieces of Turtles 8” format. So part of me is thinking, maybe I'm not going to do Issue Four CAN portfolios. Maybe I'll do Issue Four “Pieces of Turtles 8” format with 16 pages, eight pages of commentary, eight pages of pages. And then I go, no no no, they've got to be CAN portfolios. So then it's like, well okay, I can't do CAN portfolios until we figure out the Camp David spacing problem and how many of these I'm going to get produced. I have no idea what Packaging Too's backlog is on their cardboard stuff, which I imagine is huge, because all of that stuff is huge right now. So Michael, in answer your question, has there been anything going on with possible CAN 10 “Minds” Kickstarter? We're not anywhere close to the Kickstarter situation. It's all just in Grandpa's head right now, as Grandpa tries to move everything around, and go, okay here's all my ducks, how do I get them in order?
Matt: So, 9 was the last CAN, “Guys” is Volume 11, so “Minds” would be the next one up.
Dave: Ohh-kay…
Matt: I mean, that's because that would make sense that “Guys” is Volume 11, so “Minds” would be 10, which means you're gonna have to get those pages.
Dave: So I have to go back to “Minds”, I can't go onto “Guys”, I've got the wrong one. Michael R is right.
Matt: Mike's right, we're wrong, but at the same time you could sketch out what you were gonna… you could do the note pages for “Guys”, have it ready, and then just put the pages back in off-site storage, get the “Guys” pages, do the same thing, and then hopefully by that point Camp David's clean enough that we can go, okay, let's fill it up again!
Dave: Right. This gets into what is the ongoing situation at the Off-White House and with Aardvark-Vanaheim. That doesn't make money! [laughs] That's stuff that you have to do to do to do, to get to do to get to the point where you can get to the point where you can make money, and it's like that's not happening. Which is why I put together “Pieces of Turtles 8” #1 in about 48 hours and “Pieces of Turtles 8” #8.2 in about 48 hours, because then I was ready to make money off of them. So that's, the logistical problem on that one is all of this stuff keeps getting getting pushed down the line. The reason that it keeps getting pushed back into my head with the Number Four is again, that seems like the most potentially lucrative thing in terms of general interest people who are only sort of interested in “Cerebus”. If they're really sort of interested in “Cerebus”, they're interested in the first 25 issues, and the idea of getting a portfolio or two portfolios that have all of Issue Four which is a big sentimental favorite, that the potential money coming in on that probably dwarfs everything else that I'm picturing, which is why that sort of has gotten dislocated in Grandpa's mind. Now it's, okay what do I have to do to get a “Cerebus” #4 portfolio in the on-deck circle as soon as possible? And work on that, and also work on the CAN 10 “Minds” Kickstarter mentally, but “Cerebus” #4 just knocks that one completely out of the batter's box. Just dust it right back from the plate. No, do the thing that's going to make money, don't do the thing that is going to have people going, “’Minds’? Ehh, I don't even remember ‘Minds’. Maybe I'll get that one, maybe I won’t.” “The only thing,” he goes on, “The only thing I got from 1982 U.S, TOUR was that I was 15”, man oh man, this guy’s a Grandfather now. “And not reading Cerebus. I started with issue 67 and never looked back. If you ever do a 1992 U.S. TOUR 30TH ANNIVERSARY BOOK, I was at 3 stops. I believe you did a signing at Midway Comics on a Friday in Manhattan, Saturday was a comic convention and Sunday you were in Staten Island, New York at another comic store. I got a bunch of signed, bought page 20 of issue 159”, and thank you for that. That was a $100 back in 1992, which was a lot of money, and… well I've got the pages out of order, here. “and a phone book or 2. AAAAAARGH!!! ... but no photos!!! It's probably a good thing that you never relied on me to archive anything from way back then. Names and dates ... ummmm, what's dat? LOL! I'm a little better now archiving my Cerebus stuff. And stuff in general. Michael R.”
So, I would say, there's definitely far more 1982 US tour stuff then there is 1992 US tour stuff, and the reason for that, the thing that there would be more of on the 92 US tour is the news clipping, because we had a publicity firm Lekas & Levine in Chicago and that's what they accomplished. You hire people like that to get your name and picture in column inches in the newspaper. That would be a logistical nightmare to take the Seattle Post Intelligencer full page broadsheet and figure out how to either shrink that down or do everything at that size. Definitely wasn't thinking US Tour Book by 1992 because never even got around to doing the 1982 US Tour Book, didn't seem to be in demand, put most of it together and went, mhm, this just isn't something that people are going to buy. So that's the reason that there will probably be a 1982 US Tour Book but probably not a 1992 US Tour Book. I think that covers that one. Okay.
Matt: I think so.
Dave: And thank you, Michael R, as always. Always a great pleasure to be signing something that we're selling you, in this case “Pieces of Turtles” 8.2 to Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania. He specifies that that's what he wants on it, and he's always number 26. Didn't get that sequential number, but he's got his CAN number, number 26, on there.
“MJ, Mike, Sewall asks: Of many stunning covers, Issues 23 - 35 are up there as favorites. How did the painted covers for Cerebus happen? What prompted the decision? When did you know you had this amazing skill set?” [laughs] It’s really not that amazing. Which was one of the reasons that I only did it for a while. I've got my Cerebus covers book here, so I thought I'd go through them, one at a time. 23 actually isn't painted. 23, it's got a little bit of watercolour on it, most of it is marker, and the reason that it's marker and in color would have mostly to do with my affection for Bernie Wrightson's marker worker that he did. Harry Kremer had a “Superboy” pitch piece that Bernie Wrightson had done for for DC, pitching them on Wrightson doing Superboy miniseries or something like that. And it's all done in marker, Harry bought it at a CosmiCon in Toronto, and it's the most amazing thing. You look at it and you go, yeah I know that that's marker because nothing really looks like markers and it's just spectacular, but it's spectacular because it's Bernie Wrightson, and he knew exactly what he was doing with those colours. So this is me on 23 attempting to do what I saw Bernie Wrightson doing. Something that obviously is marker with maybe some watercolour mixed in. But it's pretty good, it's pretty good for a kid that age, but it's definitely no threat to Bernie Wrightson. Same thing with 24, that's almost all marker, and same thing. It's even Bernie Wrightson’s palette, saying this is how Bernie Wrightson would do the under-lighting with the blue shaded part of Cerebus lit from below, the solid blacks, and then the Cerebus gray just put on there with a cool gray marker. And even the shadow on the wall of the plant, it's like this is something that Bernie Wrightson would do, but when Bernie Wrightson would do it, it would be absolutely brilliant. When Dave Sim does, it just looks kind of sloppy, but it's not terrible, but it's really not great. 25, that is watercolour. That was me finding a watercolour set that I think was in a box of cereal, where it's just, here's your free watercolour thing, and I just started monkeying around with it at the breakfast table with a couple of scraps of watercolour art paper and going, actually, this is really good. I'm intimidated by the idea of doing watercolours, but let's actually go ahead and do a a watercolour cover instead of a marker cover this time, and that's really what I did. 26, same thing, that's almost all watercolour. 27 is all watercolour, 28 is all watercolour, 29 is all watercolour, 30 is all watercolour, 31 is all watercolour. 32 is all watercolor, actually pretty close to how you're supposed to be doing watercolour, I'm getting to that part of the story. 33 is watercolour. At some point, I think when Deni and I went down to Poughkeepsie to visit Richard and Wendy Pini, I think I brought along a couple of the originals and Wendy looked at what I was doing and said, “What kind of paint is that?” and I said, it's watercolour, and she said, “Uh well, you're doing it wrong. That's not how you do watercolors. You're doing it as if it's gouache or acrylic, and you don't do that. You don't use watercolor just straight out of the tube. If you want to paint something straight out of the two, do gouache or do acrylic.” Which was incredibly embarrassing, that not only had I’d been doing watercolours wrong, but I've been doing them and hoisting them on the buying public! So, 34 was the first time that I actually tried to do watercolours the way Wendy described, the right way to do watercolours, which is you build up a series of glazes. You water them down, and it's mostly water, a little bit of colour, or half color half water, but that's why they call them watercolours. Watercolour is a big element of that. The best on the 34 cover is probably the banknotes, and the sort of pebbled wall background is… there! That's how you're supposed to use watercolours, and that's actually a pretty good use of watercolour. When it comes to Elrod's tunic and cape, and Cerebus, I'm doing the same thing. It's like, I don't have the patience to build up glazes, one on top of the other, on top of the other, on top of the other. I want to put a blue in that, this is what the blue looks like, and this is what I'm sticking with, and then I want to do a darker blue over top of that for the shading. And it's like, well okay, you can do that, but don't do it with watercolour. You know, do it with acrylic or water down the acrylic a little bit, but stop trying to make watercolours do what watercolours won't do. 35 is probably the closest to classic watercolour and it's just way too washed out from my point of view. It's, this is, I don't like doing watercolours because when I do watercolours the way you're supposed to do watercolours, they end up just looking all washed out, as if somebody took the colour cover and took 70% of the color out. And it's like, I hate that. I really really don't like that. So that was why that was pretty much the last watercolour cover, then I did 36 going back to using the markers, and it's like, okay, this is where I got onto this bus. Let's just forget it! [laughs] Let's forget what I don't ought to do, which is painting, and let's go back to what I do know how to do, black and white covers with separations on top of them. So here, this is the colour that I want because I looked in the separations book, and if you use this much magenta and this much cyan, this much yellow, and this much black, it gives you this kind of brownish red. That's what I want. I want, there's a colour in my mind, and I want it to look as close to that as I can possibly get it on the on the printed cover, and the only way I can do that is by looking in the separations book and saying, there, that's the red. How much magenta is this? How much cyan, how much black, how much yellow? And that was what I did from then on, until Gerhard was here. [laughs] It's like, here! You seem to understand this whole watercolour mystery thing, and I also knew about the Doctor Martin watercolour dyes. I never owned any, but I knew that a lot of the guys used those, so I said, well, there's a thing called Doctor Martin watercolour dyes, get some of those and see what you think about them. And Gerhard definitely took to watercolour dyes like the proverbial duck to water, and that's what he did almost all of his covers with. So when you're saying, “You had this amazing skill set”, I still don't have that skill set. “Have you done any painting since?” I did do a “Too Much Coffee Man” cover for Shannon Wheeler when he was doing the magazine-sized “Too Much Coffee Man.” One of the first things that I did after “Cerebus” 300 was done, and I went, okay, I don't have a “Cerebus” comic book to draw and write monthly anymore, so I really don't have the excuse to not do a watercolour painting properly, building up the glazes one at a time until I have very vivid colours that are these series of glazes. And so that's what I'm going to do. So I did the war cover for for Shannon Wheeler with Too Much Coffee Man in military garb. Obviously in Afghanistan at the time period, and the “Mullah of Too Many Demitasses” pictured on the wall behind him, and I think it probably took me at least a week to do it, going, I really don't like doing it this way, but I'm not going to do any shortcuts. I'm going to build up the glaze, build up the glaze, build up the glaze, and that pretty much did it for me a watercolour covers, until I decided to do the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” #8 cover and I went, okay, let's try doing another painted cover, and I've been halfway through that cover for a long time and it's just, I don't know what to do next. I'm figuring out different ways to build up glazes, stop trying to mix too much colour, mix smaller amounts of colour. So I've been saving my plastic Diet Coke caps, going, okay this is plastic. You'll be able to mix colour in this, but because it's a Diet Coke bottle cap, you can't mix too much colour in there. Maybe I can force myself to come up with a Turtle's green where there's just this much of the Turtle's green, because I only got one Turtle to do, and I'm building up glazes on him. Let's try and get the intensity of the glaze a little more intense than it actually is, but it's not my idea of a good time. [laughs] If you want to see Dave Sim in a bad mood, come and see Dave Sim when he's working on a watercolour for some obscure reason, because he knows watercolours always put his nose out of joint, and that will be up ahead. Sometime before the January Turtles 8 spectacular Kickstarter, I gotta get that cover done. So I'm waiting until I'm ahead on my work, and in a particularly good mood, so that I can completely kick the crap out of that good mood doing this Turtles cover and hope it goes for a lot of money at Heritage Auctions. That was one of the theories, was people will pay more for colour than for black and white, so better do a colour Turtles cover and put that with your two black and white Turtles cover. But Mike, I'm glad you like them. [laughs] I'm glad you consider them stunning covers. What do I know? I mean, it's one of those, those covers go for a lot of money. I mean, the #33 cover, which I think I donated to a charity, and then made it around until it ended up at Heritage Auctions. That was the most expensive Dave Sim “Cerebus” piece that ever sold at auction, whatever time period that was, going back to few years, but it was thousands of dollars. So it's like, man, what a weird universe that we live in, where somebody who has absolutely no idea how to do watercolours, does watercolours completely wrong, and it sells for more money than virtually every other watercolour that any other watercolour artist knows how to do watercolours has done probably in the last 25 years. And it's like, well, that's the world we live in!
Matt: [laughs] Yes! Yes it is.
Dave: Okay! And then we have a late question! Just about to do the wrap on that one, and you faxed one through today. That doesn't happen a lot, where you get a last-minute question but…
Matt: It was one of those, it came in when I was at work, and I'm like, I can send this to Dave. There was also a question on Margaret's Notebook post today, I'm like, that's gonna wait till July.
Dave: Okay. All right. Last minute question from Nadab Art, “Hi Dave, Starting on page 92 of FLIGHT we see K'Cor thinking in diamond-shaped thought balloons. That usually indicates telepathic communication, but it's almost exclusively women who can do that in the series. Cerebus is also capable of it (for a while), but I'm more curious as to how Mr. K'Cor seemingly has that ability. Thanks,
Nadab”
And we're gonna start with the name Nadab. Is this guy's name actually Nadab Art, because that's a very very funny metaphysical reference that either he's done it intentionally, in which case, whoever you actually are Nadab, nice round of applause from Dave Sim. And if his name is actually Nadab Art, then it's like wow, now we're talking on a real God-level scale of that's a very clever metaphysical witticism. I say that because Nadab is Aaron's eldest son. This all ties in together, just be patient with me here. Aaron's eldest son, who was intimately present at Mount Sinai in the second book of Moshe 24 01, also called Exodus, and later a priest in the second book of Moshe, 28 1. He transgressed the law. That takes us to Exodus 39, with his brother Abihu, in offering “unholy fire” to God for which they both die. And, it's interesting, I got that from my New Bible Dictionary. Unholy fire is not the way the King James translated, it's a “strange fire”, and they didn't offer it to God, they offered it the YHWH. You wouldn't offer fire to God, you would offer fire to, you know, the prince of fire, but that gets into “Only Dave Sim thinks that way.” They offered strange fire before the YHWH. Looking up the term strange as it applies in that passage in Strong's Concordance, the term is Zhzuwr, zed-h-zed-u-w-r or z-u-w-r, which is a primary route in Hebrew, which is something that's always going to put you on full alert when you find a Hebrew term that is a primary root in the Torah. That's a form of emphasis and what it means is to turn aside. Literally something that's foreign, strange, profane, and is also used relative to committing adultery. So it's a very interesting passage. I then went and said, okay, now I have to explain the strange fire before the YHWH, and… what you discover is, this is part of the instructions of… this is second book of Moshe, chapter 30. Exodus, in other words. 30, 34, “And the YHWH said onto Moshe, take unto thee sweet spices stacked, and annika, and galbanum. Sweet spices with pure frankincense of each shall there be a like.” And the King James interpolates weight. A like weight, but it doesn't say that, it says a like, so no idea what the YHWH is talking about, “A like. And thou shalt make it a perfume, a confection after the art of the apothecary, tempered together pure and pure holy. And thou shalt beat of it very small.” And again the King James interpolates some so that it says, “And thou shalt beat some of it very small”, but it doesn't say that. The YHWH is saying, “And thou shalt beat of it very small and put of it before the testimony in the tabernacle of the congregation where I will meet with thee. It shall be unto you most holy.” So what happens is… where's… now I'm looking for the strange fire, um… anyway in the seventh attempt, I'm supposed to have it here somewhere, this is really irritating. [flips pages] Okay, I don't, but anyway, when they offer the strange fire to the YHWH, I wasn't aware of the fact that I guess the best thinking among Talmudic scholars is that this violated the idea of where you're supposed to offer the strange fire and when you're supposed to offer it, and that they didn't create the fire where they were supposed to create it. They brought it from somewhere else or they brought it at the wrong time. But anyway, they get quick fried by the YHWH. This fire comes out and incinerates Nadab and Abihu for offering strange fire before the YHWH, and obviously is a jaw-dropping moment for all of the Hebrew people and Moshe tells Aaron, who, you know, Nadab and Abihu are his sons, and he's just seen them completely incinerated by fire, “Don't mourn.” You know, don't pull out your hair, don't tear your clothing, don't react to this in any way, because obviously the YHWH is really really steamed. Let the Hebrew people mourn for your sons. You keep as straight a face as you can, and the same thing with your two remaining sons, because you've still got two more sons. You don't want to do anything that's going to get them incinerated. My inference is that this is an extension of the the pagan tabernacle that actually originated in Egypt, which is what the YHWH is getting the Hebrew people to build, and this was part of, okay, now that we've got badger skins dyed blue and purple, and, you know, all of the attaches and the ivory and and whatever else. The basic Vatican giant loot thing. Now that we've got this happening, we also need the incense, because that's another pagan thing, is you've got to have clouds and clouds of this stuff that make the place of pagan worship smell specifically like this. Not just smell really good. This is [laughs] as far as I can see the mistake that Nadab and Abihu made was going, “Uh, I'll tell you what. Let's experiment with these ingredients and see if we can get something that smells a little different.” And it's like, mmhm, you don't want to do that with the YHWH because like YHWH is fine-tuning everything to exactly what is in conformity with what YHWH needs in terms of, here's the badger skins, here's how long the curtains are supposed to be, here's how far apart they're supposed to be, here's the distance between this and this. All the thing that I made fun of in “Latter Days” of, here's what the tabernacle looks like, and it's just pages and pages and pages describing what the tabernacle is supposed to look like complete. Complete paganism. So, it was, no, this has to be put a stop to and as emphatically as possible. Do not mess with the tabernacle. Do exactly what the YHWH tells you to do with the tabernacle because if you don't your firstborn and your second born children are going to get reduced to a little pile of ashes, because I want you to understand how important this is. And everybody picked up on that real good. This is really really important. Which is why it's interesting that the person asking the question here is Nadab Art, because essentially that's what I'm doing, is, by Dave Sim saying, okay I'm the only person on the planet that believes this, but I tell you this fits the story a heck of a lot better than your idea that God and YHWH are the same being. I'm offering strange fire before the YHWH, and it's like, yeah granted. I've taken that as a given since I started writing about my take on the YHWH, and no question about it. I could get incinerated at any moment, but that hasn't happened so far. I don't know if it's just something where, okay, you get X amount of time to completely finish what it is that you have to say and be saying. But man oh man, are you asking for it, and man oh man, are you going to get it.
So, now this ties in with the question that you're asking, Nadab, which was “Starting on page 92 of ‘Flight’, we could see K’Cor thinking in diamond-shaped thought balloons. That usually indicates telepathic communication.” Right! Now you have to remember, that “Flight” is the beginning of the last half of “Cerebus”, so basically what I'm doing is an allegory in Imesh with K’Cor devoting his entire life to building this monument which is effectively the infinity symbol stood on its head. I mean, it's usually the infinity symbol sideways, this one's vertical, and obviously a macro-cosmic construct, particularly when Gerhard got his turn to do it. It's like, we've got to make this look really really big. It's taking up most of the city of Imesh, and we're going to have a teeny tiny Cerebus and a teeny tiny K’Cor illuminated by torches. And just looking at it today, Gerhard really knocked that one out of the ballpark. But anyway, the construct is basically the same thing that I'm doing with Cerebus. It was, Cerebus is like a giant infinity symbol. The first half of the book up to 150 being the male loop on the infinity symbol, and then 151 to 300 was going to be the female loop. And basically what I was doing was saying, okay I'm just starting my second loop, [laughs] K’Cor is pretty far along on his second loop. Like, he's not all the way through, but you'd have to say he's a good halfway through. What happens when you get to that point, halfway or better, through your female loop? Does the goddess suddenly make sense to you? Which obviously it has with K’Cor. He's completely in tune with what I knew as Cirin, but as YHWH in that all he does is think and talk about the goddess, and obviously if they’re his thoughts, they’re “his thoughts” in quotation marks. So those thoughts are being planted in his head. So I was saying, I don't know, is that what happens? It's like, you know, ever since Michael Loubert came up with, you know, “you’ve got a matriarchy in Upper Felda”, “I've got a matriarchy? Really?!” and then when you move that to the deistic level going, “A goddess? Really? You really think that there's a goddess or goddesses? I just can't see that.” It's like, well maybe you have to do your first loop, and as you get through your second loop you go, “Ohhh, goddess! Of course it's a goddess! It's not really God. God has actually been a goddess the whole time, how could I have not seen that?” And then I thought it was pretty clever, I flipped ahead, I kept going with this but anecdotally, episodically, with the structure of “Flight” and I'm going, “Where did I get back to this?” And I'm flipping through, and it's like, yes, Cerebus appears before K’Cor, and K’Cor knows exactly what he wants to ask Cerebus, which is, “Where did you go when you disappeared?” It's like, Cerebus, you know. No reason to lie, “I went to the moon” and it's like, “Oh okay. What's life like on the moon?” and it's like, [laughs] “Ah, there's actually this crazy guy who wanders around in this gray empty landscape and all he does is talk and think about the goddess.” And even K’Cor had to find that funny, going, “Yeah okay, so it resonates everywhere.” It's like, obviously the goddess is in control of everything because not only is it like that here, not only is it like that in Imesh, not only is it like that when you build this giant construct, it's like that on the moon, as well. And it's like, oh okay that seems more than a little nutty to me, and still seems more than a little nutty to me, but then I didn't know how large a construct I was in, where, “Okay you thought the first loop was the first half of ‘Cerebus’, the second loop was second half of ‘Cerebus’, and actually the first loop was “Cerebus”, like all 300 issues. You didn't know that somewhere up ahead you're gonna do the Strange Death of Alex Raymond, which was put together by Ward Green, who thought that he was patronizing Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck, of fortune. And you have no idea that, yes, this is this is a much bigger story than you ever imagined that you're going to be doing”, and I don't know if I'm halfway through my second loop, halfway through Strange Death of Alex Raymond, but it still seems completely crazy to me. It's still,uh no, I can't really see a goddess, I can't really see feminism, I can't see the sort of stuff that feminists come up with, you know, climate change seems seems nutty to me, but there you go. There's the long answer to Nadab's question, and I hope that Nadab takes that in in the spirit in which it was intended.
Matt: [chortles] Okay.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I mean, I'm just thinking about it. I mean, in “Flight”, that's part of the chess game, isn't it?
Dave: Yes! Yes. That's… K’Cor was one of the bishops, I think?
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: So it's, yeah, well, what is a bishop? You know, a bishop is is a hierophant. A bishop is a priest. A bishop is the person who interprets scripture, interprets mystical events, and says, “Here. This is definitively what this is.” I think we're coming to the point as a civilization where, mmhm, that's not really happening anymore. It's like, as much as anyone has the good faith to be a good Anglican, or a good Presbyterian, or a good Catholic, or a good Orthodox Jew, there's just way too much going on in terms of interpretation. In terms of, well okay this could be this. Well up until now we've said, “Our entrenched priesthoods have said this is this, that's not that, and you better agree with us or we're going to burn you at at the stake, or break you on the rack, or put you in prison.” That's a good way to persuade somebody that this is the only proper way to look at this thing, but it's like, “We don't do that now.” So now it's getting to the point of, well, even if you don't want to interpret scripture in your own mind at variance with how scripture is being interpreted, you're probably still going to do that. You can say, “I won't do that” but you have a modern mind. You have a modern mind that says, no, there's a whole spectrum of viewpoints. So you're going to be chopping and picking and choosing from a variety of different things, and deciding what it is that they mean, from the microcosmic to the microcosmic. Why was Nadab and Abihu's strange fire strange? What made it strange? And like I say, reading between the lines, I think the Levitical priesthood and the Talmudic scholars over the last number of centuries, you know, over the last millennia when you're talking about the Torah, you're talking about jews, have said, “Okay, these are the two things that from a Levitical standpoint and from a Talmudic scholar’s standpoint, these are the two greatest likelihoods” Well, I don't owe those, in my own mind, to entities’ deference. So I say, well I think it was strange fire because they changed the ingredients, and whatever it was, whatever it is incense is to the YHWH the apex pagan construct creation that was a definite no-no because incense wasn't a small deal, or wasn't thought by that apex presence to be a small deal, which is why obviously, you know, frying somebody down to complete ashes is, well, if you want to get across “Don't do that” that's a good way to get across “Don't do that.”
So we're coming up on three hours here, Matthew.
Matt: I was gonna say, I think this might be the longest one we've done.
Dave: It's getting close if it's not, it's a contender. So, much appreciation to you for your patience, and the viewers for their patience in, a lot of them actually even just listening to this, wow, listening to listening to this sort of stuff for three hours. My mind is a playground, so thanks for coming to Dave's playground for three hours.
Matt: As I say whenever somebody mentions something I find it and post it on the Facebook group is, it's my job! [laughs]
Dave: There you go. There you go. Okay all the best to Paula, and Janice Pearl, and Natasha, as always, and will talk to you again, God-willing, next month.
Matt: Yes, we will! Enjoy the rest of your evening, Dave.
Dave: Thanks. Take care, Matt.
Matt: You too!
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: [clears throat] And now for the members of the Little Orphan Aardvark Secret Society. a special message from Aardvark for you members of the Little Orphan Aardvark Secret Society. Set your decoder wheels to A = copyright. The message, from Aardvark to you, remember Aardvark’s depending on you, is seven, E, space, M, copyright, 6, E, space, D, E, E, diamond, space, 4, 2, 9, infinity, diamond, I, space, 4, skull and crossbones, space, 2, E, copyright, A, M, space, 9, skull and crossbones, 5, space, copyright, D, skull and crossbones, 5, 4, space, 9, skull and crossbones, 5, 2, space, A, copyright, 2, Q, 3, space, 7, copyright, 2, 2, copyright, diamond, 4, 9, space, 9, skull and crossbones, 5, 2, space, A, copyright, 2, Q, 3, space, 7, copyright, 2, 2, copyright, diamond, 4, 9, space, infinity, 3, space, copyright, D, skull and crossbones, 5, 4, space, 4, skull and crossbones, space, E, 8, 0, infinity, 2, E, space, skull and crossbones, 2, space, M, copyright, 3, space, E, 8, 0, infinity, 2, E, V, Pisces, space, 4, skull and crossbones, space, 3, 0, E, copyright, spade, space, 4, skull and crossbones, space, copyright, space, heart, infinity, 6, E, space, A, 5, 3, 4 skull and crossbones, club, E, 2, space, 3 copyright, heart, E, 3, space, 2, E, 0, 2, E, 3, E, diamond, 4, copyright, 4, infinity, 6, E, C, space, 0, 2, E, 3, 3, space, Taurus, space, diamond, skull and crossbones, seven, Pisces, space, 4, skull and crossbones, space, D, E, space, 2, E, club, skull and crossbones, 6, E, V, space, S, 2, skull and crossbones, club, space, skull and crossbones, 5, 2, space, A, copyright, heart, heart, space, heart, infinity, 3, 4, space, 0, 2, E, 3, 3, space, Gemini. Remember Aardvark is counting on you!
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