Hi, Everybody!
Mondays!
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Jesse Lee Herndon has caught up to Dave and I on the Please Hold Transcripts, And since I'm out of Proto-Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, I may as well start knocking out these transcripts.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
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[guitar music]
Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt! Jeeze, it’s been a while!
Matt: [laughs] Thank you for the extra week!
Dave: No problem, no problem. How did things go with the goils at their activities?
Matt: Great! In fact, I dropped Natasha off at the theater, ran to the copy store, and made copies of the blue line I made for Matisse, and bought the ink and the brush I use, so it's one of those, I got stuff done I just couldn't be on the phone.
Dave: Right! Right. Okay, here we go! Here we go. It’s, as you say here, “it's past that time of the month, and thanks for that, so here we go. Last time it was my turn to remember Jeff, but you took my turn to discuss his Guide to Self-Publishing,” that's right, I forgot that, and thank you to you and Steve for it. “No problem. So this time is your turn, but I got a ringer! It's Steve Peters, who’s running a Crowdfundr for his latest Comicverse book, “Comicverse: Behind the Counter” #2”, and congratulations, Steve! I don't think it's just my imagination. I think he's getting these books out faster than he used to.
Matt: This one, he's got a lot of guest artists, so I think that might be part of it, is just that he's got more help pushing the boulder up the hill.
Dave: There you go. There you go. Okay, so you're going to read a Steve Peters Jeff memory.
Matt: Yes, he sent this in to me, and then I forgot to acknowledge I got it, so we sent in a second message going, “Hey did you get that?” and I'm like, yeah yeah I got it sorry I forgot to respond.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: But, “Seiler's story for Please Hold, from Steve Peters. Hey Dave and Matt, I've been wanting to tell my one and only Jeff Seiler story. I can't remember the actual quote from Dave, and I'm too busy to try and go back and find it, but it was something like Jeff had a tendency to be annoying without trying or was unintentionally annoying or something like that. I think it was SPACE 2007 perhaps, the year I received the Dave prize, or at least one of the years that a large gathering of Cerebus Yahoos attended. As I've done for many years, I was doing free sketches on my Awakening Comics sketch cards for anyone that purchased something. Following Dave's advice in the Guide to Self-Publishing, the first sketch would be really good so that the recipient would show it off and other people would come around want one too. So Jeff came around, bought a comic, and I did a really nice sketch for him. A little later, he came by again, bought another comic, and I did another sketch for him. Later, same thing. Around about the fourth or fifth comic, I was really wanting to shake him and say, ‘Dude, just buy a bunch of comics and I'll do a really big super detailed sketch for you.’”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: “He's the only person that ever did that.” And that's Steve's story.
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: And when I read it, I started laughing cause, a few years back, wanting to just draw more and not fight giving myself a reason to draw more, I offered up on the blog of anyone that wants a free sketch, I will send a free drawing to. And I had a couple that I had done that as a mock-up of, okay you know, this is kind of, it's gonna be a half an eight and a half by eleven sheet of my cardstock that I like to draw on, and cause it'll fit in an envelope. Tell me you want free stuff, send an email saying you want free stuff, and give me your address, and I will send back free stuff. And Jeff commented of, “I'll take all of them” and it's like, that's not how this works, Jeff.
Dave: [laughs] You really do get a lot of that, don't you? The “that's not how we're doing this at all!”
Matt: Right, you would think that I would get better at explaining things.[laughs]
Dave: Yeah, you you would you would think, but you'd be wrong.
Matt: Exactly!
Dave: Okay, next, two bits of Strange Death of Alex Raymond business. First, here's a letter Hal Foster sent Milt Caniff, and this goes back to 1938, and this is when Foster was still in Topeka, Kansas. So that's going back a ways. He's a year into doing Prince Valiant, so he's a much happier camper then he was when he was doing Tarzan prior to 1937. I like his heading, [laughs] “Milt Caniff, somewhere in China I guess”, because almost all of Milt's stories were… Terry and the Pirates were centered centered in China uh in the in the pre-war years. “Dear Milton, I would like to be the best funny paper artist in the U.S. if people like you and Alex Raymond would quit stepping on my fingers and getting in my hair. There doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it except learn how to draw, and that is the reason for this letter. Would you be so foolish, I mean, would you be so kind as to let me have one of your Sunday pages that I can study it, see if there's anything in the way you do it that I can steal? In return for this favour I will send you one of my Prince Valiant pages, if you wish. Beyond a doubt, this will give me the best of the bargain, and you will be justified in squawking. In that case, I will send you only a blank sheet which will be of more value in that it can be put to some good use. If you are too mean to send me a page, or if you object to my stealing your stuff, just say so, and I won’t object. But you might see one of my pages come out with Val saying, ‘Milton Caniff is a heel’. Hoping that you are properly intimidated by this threat and will consent to exchanging pages with me. I am yours truly, Harold R Foster.” I think this supports my contention in Strange Death of Alex Raymond, that these guys really didn't know how to deal with each other. Practically overnight, well Foster had been doing Tarzan since since 1929, but Raymond and Caniff were relatively new, and then suddenly they’re the kings of the Sunday pages. I mean, they were definitely the guys that when you hit that page while you were thumbing through Buck the Comic Weekly or whatever it was you were getting your giant Sunday pages in, it's like, wow this guy can really draw. And you would say that about all three of them but for different reasons. So there's a weird, “Well, okay, we know who the kings of the castle are, and we see each other’s work every week, and we're all getting terribly impressed not only with ourselves but with each other, how do we deal with each other?” And it's like, there really wasn't much precedence for that in the comics field, because most of the guys were real working class, or even poorer than working class, guys who were suddenly making hundreds of thousands of dollars when there was no income tax, and just doing funny pictures and making gags. And it's like, “Okay, well, all we can do is go out and get ourselves drunk, and buy way too many cars, and way too many big houses, and basically just stay out of the way of our wives.” The whole Bringing Up Father kind of thing. So I appreciate, who was it that found this letter online? Do you remember?
Matt: I can't remember, but that showed up and within a day somebody posted the clip of Hal Foster on “This is Your Life“ from 1953.
Dave: Right. I haven't seen that, but that's uh…
Matt: I watched it, going, I mean, come on, they gotta bring out one of his peers, and it was like, no, it's the girl that he had a crush on when he was 14…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: His buddy in Canada, who, the two of them decided to go to Chicago together, you know, “We're gonna emigrate to America on bicycle!”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And like his buddy, halfway there went, “This is miserable. I'm going home” and he went, “Nope, I'm going to Chicago by bicycle.”
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: I’m trying to think who… there was a couple of old girlfriends, his wife eventually comes up onto the stage and then at the end they bring out a bunch of people, but they don't introduce anybody, and I'm going, none of these guys look familiar. It's probably all old high school friends they could, you know, “Hey, let's get everybody out on a plane and fly into Los Angeles for the weekend.”
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: I'm trying to remember, there's an actress, she is Hal Foster and his wife's contact in that they're at the studio as guests of her, and she's there for whatever made-up reason, and then she comes on stage, and goes, “Well actually, I'm here with my friends” and that's when it's, “Oh!” and they take the “This is Your Life” book and walk out to talk to Hal Foster, and he's kind of got a look on his face of. “This isn't really happening” and “No, yeah, no, it's happening, Hal, you're going up on stage. Do you recognize this voice?” and of course, you know. I mean, I'm a huge Firesign Theater fan, and on their third album they have a made-up 1940s movie star, who at one point he's an old guy and it's “What are you gonna do when the original actress that played Bottles falls through that trap door?” and he he goes, “Oh God, that woman's trying to kill me!”
Dave: Right.
Matt: So watching “This is Your Life”, I always think back on that. I mean, how many times do you think it happened on the show where it was, “Hey, here's your old roommate” it's like, “That guy owes me money. Thanks for finding him!”
Dave: Right. Well that's the whole thing. It was there was more pretense to it than actuality, but everybody thought that they were watching something actual. I mean the only reason that they did “This is Your Life” for Hal Foster was because the Prince Valiant movie was coming up. It’s, “Okay, there is X number of ways that we pump up a cartoon property in the real world, and Ralph Edwards is one of them.” Which is why if you look at it and get a proper distance from it, why would you bring this person on? Why would you bring that person on? Because they knew, “Okay, this is what Mr and Mrs America wants to see, is what they would have if they were on ‘This is Your Life’ and Ralph Edwards was telling them stuff.” But it had very little to do with actuality.
So that brings us to the, “Steve Leiber shared on the Twitter, the new book about the illustrator Austin Briggs has an anecdote about the time Briggs and Alex Raymond took so much speed while working on Flash Gordon they went off the clock and made hentai”?
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Yeah. It's, uh, oh boy, does this open the can of worms. [laughs]
Matt: [laughs] I saw it on Twitter and went, that's something that I should send Eddie for the slush pile of “Hey, here's a weird SDoAR-related thing” and then I'm like, no, I'm just gonna throw this on the Please Hold pile because I don't want to wait for Eddie to finally get it to you, and for you to finally find it.
Dave: Okay, alright.
Matt: This is weird! [laughs]
Dave: Reading the excerpt, “According to Dad's account”, and this is the son of Austin Briggs, “he and Raymond once worked round the clock to meet an overdue deadline. Desperate to catch up they began popping Benzedrine to stay awake. By the time they inked in the last panel, at dawn found themselves too hopped up to rest, let alone sleep. To burn off their highs, Raymond and Dad amused themselves by creating a continuation of the sequence they had been working on ‘The Ice Kingdom of Mongo.’ The story featured the sexy Fria, Queen of Frigia, who ruled an underground kingdom guarded by giant Ice Worms and menaced by a Glacier Monster whose octopus-like tentacles snaked their way through ice tunnels.” Which is a very strange encapsulation of “Ice Kingdom of Mongo” to begin with, but, let's leave that alone for a moment. “Working with their reading of the sub-text of the story, my father and Raymond produced a hilariously pornographic Sunday strip in which the tentacles became very free indeed in their dealings with a by no means frigid Fria of Frigia.” Uh, okay, [laughs] This gets into… well, first of all, all of Raymond's work on Flash Gordon was done at the Mayapple Road house. He did not have his studio outside of the house, so this is the family house. And so, I can certainly understand that Briggs is coming over to work on at the house. I forget how young their youngest child would have been at that time, 1939? I pulled out the book, and I've gone through it, and it's like, okay, the part that they're talking about, the tentacles, and I have to admit, “Kingdom of Mongo” has more phallic imagery in it, unconscious, I would assume, phallic imagery, than just about any 10 entertainment forms you could pick out. So the idea that whoever the youngest child was in the Raymond family in 1939, would have been like five, six, maybe something like that. And the idea that you would work around the clock and suddenly, as the sun's coming up, start producing a pornographic Sunday strip while Helen Raymond is getting up and the littlest Raymond is getting up, and the next littlest Raymond is getting up. That just doesn't wash. That's one of those, Austin Briggs was definitely anti-anti-anti-anti comics work, including his own. Didn't like that comic books were starting to become more respectable, and consequently I think started manufacturing these kinds of stories and exaggerating things. They might have joked back and forth about, “Hey we could do this. Ha ha ha.” But the idea that work around the clock and then keep drawing and draw a pornographic version of “The Ice Kingdom of Mongo”? That just doesn't wash. So it would be, I think, however his son heard the story, sons do tend to exaggerate their father's stories. Like you do find out, “Okay, can you go and ask your Dad if that actually happened?” and it's like, “Actually, no it didn't. He said, no, that middle part in in the story you just made that up completely, but it's very funny! You know, it makes it a much better story, which is usually what happens is something that makes the story funnier is preferable to 100% accuracy.
The quarrel is really between Ron Goulart ,who maintains that Austin Briggs did a lot of the work on Flash Gordon, was basically either Raymond's assistant or ghosted a bunch of them. And I tend to side with Tom Roberts, which is, no, Austin Briggs worked on Secret Agent X-9 because Alex Raymond got himself in a situation where he was just doing way way way too much work between Flash Gordon and Secret Agent X-9. It was very lucrative, but he just couldn't draw that fast. So he learned to divide his attention. “I'll work with Austin Briggs. Thank you for finding this guy for me, and he will do a lot of the heavy lifting on Secret Agent X-9, because on Flash Gordon I want to do everything myself. Flash Gordon is my baby. I don't want anybody working on Flash Gordon.” The same way that he didn't want anybody else working on Rip Kirby. “If this is my thing, this is my thing, and I'm gonna do it from beginning to end.” I think there definitely was a situation where Raymond got the pneumonia at one point, and it's like King Features is going, “We really don't care how much you care about this comic strip, how much it's your baby, because it's not really your baby, it's our baby. And we want our baby done and at the engravers by whatever it was, like a week from Thursday, and then we want the next one the following Tuesday. Because you're just giving us the runaround. You're not producing and we've got hundreds of newspapers that need to have these Sunday strips in there, so sorry. Austin Briggs is going to help you on this.” So I think that Austin Briggs, my theory is, having looked at “Ice Kingdom of Mongo”, which I think is the germ of truth to the story. If you look at, [laughs] I don't know how many people on “The Ice Kingdom of Mongo” handy. I know I do. If you look at the October 1939 strips, there is like three or four of them in a row that are just, [sneezes] excuse me, absolutely jaw-dropping. Starting with October 8th, October 15th, October 22nd, October 29th. The balance of black and the white and the effects that Raymond was doing, of, he would take red pen and he would draw on the original in red pen outlining where the white area is going to go. That told the engraver, anything that's outlined in red, just leave the interior of that white. And obviously inking the black to to create lighting effects, and I'm pretty sure that Raymond probably coughing his lungs out is explaining to Austin Griggs like, “This is really really important to me that this has to look right. Here's the theory that I'm working on, because the lighting effects on the translucent or transparent winter gear that everybody's wearing,this is how I am establishing that this is transparent and this is this is how it's got to be done.” Showing him probably proofs from the preceding two or three weeks where he started doing it and saying, “Like this is what I want and it's gotta be high quality.” And I'm pretty sure that Austin Briggs was picking up on what Raymond was saying, was “Don't do a Secret Agent X-9 on this. By the time you were working on Secret Agent X9, I didn't give a crap what Secret Agent X-9 looked like, I was putting all my time in on Flash Gordon.” Consequently, I think Austin Briggs went, “Okay, you know, this is a guy that I've worked with, this is a lucrative gig. I'm here to help him get back on schedule, and I understand that it's really really important that this looks really really good.” So he looked at what Raymond was doing and went, “Oh okay, I know what he's doing. He's not quite as good at this as the other big market illustrators are, but I understand what he's trying to do. Here, you pencil it, and you tell me where you want to do whatever it is that you want me to do. Either the solid black highlights or putting in the red outlines to show where the light goes.” And it's Al Williamson level of quality in 1939. There's one wide shot with October 15th, the first battle of the wide shot, and it's unbelievably beautifully lit where whatever Austin Briggs was doing on it and whatever Raymond was doing on it, Raymond didn't have to do all of it, so Raymond could concentrate on making it the absolute best that he could make it, and Austin Briggs is going, “Well, this is just day at the office stuff for me, like I understand what he's talking about. Here's the light source, it's in the upper right corner of the panel, and they're flashing their Flash Gordon laser thing into the upper right corner, so all of these characters are lit from that light source.” And it's just miles beyond what Raymond was doing at the time. And then it upped Raymond's game. From then on, he's… the establishment of light, the “this is where the light is coming from. This is where the highlights are.” It's just absolutely jaw-dropping because he didn't have anybody else working on it who went, “There's basic day at the office stuff that you're not getting here , but I'm here to help you get back on schedule. You tell me where where I fit in, and I'll work on those panels, and you work on your panels, and I'll be in Scotland before you.”
Matt: [chuckles]
Dave: And that's what I'm seeing here . That's subjective viewpoint. You're never going to convince Ron Goulart that Austin Briggs didn't do most of the work or a good chunk of the work on Alex Raymond's pages, and that Austin Briggs ghosted a bunch of pages, but if you look at Austin Briggs on his own, that was the guy that they gave Flash Gordon to when Raymond went in the Army. It's like, mhmm, no, it's, he wasn't drawing at this level because when Flash Gordon became his thing, this is it, he's just supposed to deliver Flash Gordon. It's like, “Well, they don't know what they're looking at. They don't really care one way or the other as long as it's Flash Gordon and Dale Arden and Dr Zarkov and all the faces look the way that they're supposed to. That's it! I can mail in most of this, and that's all I'm concerned about. I'm gonna put in my heavy lifting on magazine illustration that's gonna be seen by real people and get me more real jobs.” So, it was, well okay, now it's Please Hold for Dave Sim, and this is what we're talking about, so I pulled it out, and it's like, yeah, I remember looking at the October 1939 pages, and going, no, this is just worlds above. If you look at Flash Gordon's boots, it's like Raymond had been doing much much better glossy black boots than he'd been doing, but he wasn't as that Al Williamson level where you just go, “How can you see that? How can you know that that brush stroke, and that brush stroke, will make this look exactly like black shiny military boots?” And I would credit Briggs and Raymond playing off of each other. It was probably a miserable month for Raymond whenever they were producing those, it'd probably be September, August, 1939. You know, what a horrible thing to go, “Well, how do I do this when I have pneumonia?” Well, not easily! Let's put it that way.
Matt: I just grabbed my… I own three volumes of Flash Gordon, I grabbed the third one because I'm like, oh that's about the right time, and it ends in July of 39.
Dave: There you go. Yeah Yeah. I've only got three of them, I forget which one I'm missing, but you can't find those no more. It's like they're really really good volumes. They're definitely, they're shot from I think the printed comic strips, but the white is white, and the blacks are black, and the colours are accurate, which is an amazing amazing technological achievement. So, Steve, in answer to your question… or…
Matt: Answer my question!
Dave: Matt’s question, “Do you think that Raymond kept up his Benzedrine use, and could that account for the shakiness in his lines later in life, or do you think he gave up the drugs and that led to the shakiness?” Speed isn't really like that. It's just gonna keep you awake a lot longer than you would ordinarily stay awake. It's not a jittery high like like caffeine. So I would say, I don't really think that… you know, if this is… again, I come down on Tom Roberts’ side, that there's pages in here and we can argue about which ones they are, where Austin Briggs helped Alex Raymond when he had pneumonia. If you have pneumonia and you're dragging yourself to your drawing board, you're probably not going to take Benzedrine on top of it. Anybody's gonna know, that's probably not gonna help a whole lot.
Matt: Okay. I just was thinking, there's the old, they did a biopic of Johnny Cash called “Walk the Line” and at one point they're backstage at a… you know, he's on the road and with the band, they're backstage and somebody offers them some pills, and he's like, “I don't know if I want to take any of that stuff” and they're like, “Oh it's fine. Look at Elvis! He’s taking them!” And the camera pans over to Elvis, and Elvis is walking like the way he dances. [laughs]
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I know that there was that mentality for the longest time of, “Well, if it's prescribed by a doctor, it's not drugs, it's medicine.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: So I just didn't know if maybe Raymond had a legal drug problem or..
Dave: Uhh, there's no way of knowing that one. This is the first time I’ve ever seen the association of Benzedrine with Alex Raymond, and the fact that it's coming from somebody who was really really really bitterly anti-comic art, comic artists, you know, “This is ridiculous calling this art. No, magazine illustration is art. This is complete pap.” He's not gonna be a a reliable witness, I don't think, personally, that's my assessment.
Matt: Okay. I mean, it's one of those, like I said, it came across, and I went, well, that's interesting, you know. And I figured, send it up and see what happens.
Dave: Well, I got to tell you, it was a real real day brightener for me today, going, oh! These pages! And yeah, I could spend a very happy week just looking at the Flash Gordon October 1939 pages that wouldn't apply to the pages around it.
MJ “Mike” Sewall out in Californi-a, asks, “Hey Manly Matt, here is my annoying and overly intrusive monthly question for Dave.” Where would we be without MJ “Mike” Sewall’s annoying and overly intrusive monthly question?
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: “Doing all my obsessiv Cerebus and Dave Sim research way out of order. Question, what is the current state of the Cerebus Archive plan? Who are the caretakers? Where is It ultimately going? Important point, no, for the record, I do not want Dave to die. Thanks, MJ Mike Sewell.” To which Matt replied, “Mike, it goes to Eddie. He's the successor. -Manley.” And then Mike said, “Great! It's just that the saga of the archive’s final destination has changed many times over the years. Up to you and Dave if you want to talk about that. Thanks for the update.” Uh, yes the the idea is the easiest way to keep everything in order and to make sure that everything is passed on to future generations without just sort of scattering to the winds, I figured out a while ago is, well okay, apart from the pages themselves, everything is in the Off-White House and in Camp David. So that's what I want to do is leave both of those to a successor, which a lot of people disagree with, but that seemed the most sensible thing to me. Because the sheer volume of material, which, I know where everything is but then I've lived here for 30 years so I know just about where everything in the Off-White House is. I don't know where things are in Camp David because Rolly's in charge of Camp David. So as an example today, Mike Jones, who works with Bill Loebs came up from from Michigan to pick up the Off-White House copies of “Journey” which was a longbox. And autographed all of those, Bill Loebs will autograph all of those, and then they will get them slabbed through CGC. I went out to Camp David last night because I go, okay I pulled out the longbox of “Journeys” and said, “Rolly, keep track of these because at some point this year Mike Jones is coming up from from Michigan on his way to Pennsylvania, and I'm gonna want to autograph all of these.” and I went out back and I could not find the box! [laughs] And it's like, how do you hide a longbox of copies of “Journey “. I left a phone message for Rolly, saying that when when you come in tomorrow, pull all of those out, put them out for me to autograph, and when I went out back, there they all were, and it's like, okay, I give up. Where were the “Journey”? And it's like, the “Journey” were in the same spot, but he had turned the box lid around. So it was the old box lid where it was “Cerebus back issues” listed on it. And it's like, wow, what a criminal genius. All you have to do is turn the box lid around, and Dave Sim is absolutely lost. You might as well have just stolen all of the Off-White House “Journey” copies.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: But getting back to Mike's question, the biggest current concern that I have right now is, whenever it happens and Eddie becomes the new President of Aardvark-Vanaheim, is he going to move into the Off-White House? And one of the biggest elements to that is, Eddie lives in Vancouver, and Vancouver is much much much less winter-like than Southern Ontario tends to be. So I picture him, even with with all the best wishes in the world going, “Okay, I'm the new President of Aardvark-Vanaheim. I'm going to wrap up things with my day job and move the Kitchener and move into the Off-White House.” I picture him along about the middle of December going, “How do people live like this?! [laughs] This is insane! This is like living inside a refrigerator and all these people are walking around as if this is normal!” You know what I'm talking about because you live in Wisconsin.
Matt: Yeah, I know, and that's… I haven't turned the heat on yet, and Paula and I are, it's pretty much every night we look at the forecast going, is it gonna get close enough to freezing that we want to turn the heat on just to keep the pipes from freezing? And we kinda had an argument where she's going, “Oh, we don't need to do that.” I'm like, I'm not dealing with burst pipes so yeah. But, so far it's been, oh it's in the 40s, we're good, we're good, and as soon as it dips to 36, it's gonna be close enough for me. I'm putting the heat on at 50 and the kids will just have to wear sweaters. I don't care.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I'm trying to go as long as I can before I have to start using the heat, but yeah, you know, I could see Eddie sending out messages of, “Hey, if you guys want to support Aardvark-Vanaheim, sweaters and blankets!”
Dave: Yes. Yes. And space heaters. I've got this Mr Freeze theory. Remember Mr Freeze from the “Batman” TV show where he would just have this this control box that would heat these little square areas? And that's really how I live at the Off-White House. I have a space heater next to the drawing board, and I have a space heater in my bedroom, and a space heater in the work office upstairs, and wherever I am, I put the space heater on. Apart from that, it’s really not unbelievable in here. The joke about Canadian winters, that Canada has four seasons: June, July, August, and winter. So I think a long story short, it might turn out to be Rolly being the on-site custodian at the Off-White House and Eddie Khanna will be the remote President of Aardvark-Vanaheim in Vancouver, where, okay, they got major major junkie problems, you know, downtown East side, but at least it's more livable temperatures. So not at all annoying, not overly intrusive, it's, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, then people can say, “Well, he did talk about Eddie staying in Vancouver and Rolly being the on-site custodian. Let's see how that goes.” Which is one of the things that I like about Please Hold for Dave Sim, I can always give people the best current information as the President understands it. What did the President know and when did he know it?
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: On to Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania, asks, “Hi Matt, hope you're enjoying the beginning of autumn. Brr! No more short pants for me. Here's my questions for Dave.” That's another thing, when when you're living in Pennsylvania, Southern Ontario, or Wisconsin. The people who keep wearing short pants as if that's going to make things warmer. And we're at that in-between stage where the people who are already bundled up for winter are looking askance at the people in shorts, and the people in shorts are looking askance at the people in winter clothing. So, “Hi Dave! Last month you answered a question from Mike Sewall about Canadian comics and printing. My questions are, 1) how long have you been purchasing CGC Canadian variant comics?” Well I haven't been purchasing them, I've been trading them for “Cerebus in Hell?” copies. Doug Sulipa likes that as part of his business model, is trading dollar for dollar. He will trade $4 “Cerebus in Hell?” comics for, you know, 25 copies of each issue, and he gets the same numbers… which numbers does he get? I think it's 51 to 74 that he gets each time? And because they're not witnessed by somebody from CGC, he wants them not signed. So that's one of the first jobs that Rolly has when the new issue comes in, pull out Doug Sulipa's 51-74, and put them aside. Make sure that Dave doesn't sign those. And it's always a pleasant surprise. It's a pleasant surprise on the one side of it, because when the box comes in from Doug Sulipa, and he uses Canada Post boxes, and wrapped unimaginably securely. I've been trying to exercise the wrist a little bit more, just doing stuff that I haven't been doing for years, just to go, well okay I think it's maybe not getting better, but it's one of those back to the “don't baby it” stage. And I opened the second last box that came in, which turned out to be “Web of Spider-Man” #1 in 9.6, I think it was, with the Charles Vess cover. And boy, by the time I was done opening that box and peeling off all of the plastic wrap and cutting through the tape on all of the plastic wrap, it's a complete Maltese Falcon kind of thing, just like slashing away with the exacto knife. “I've got to get the black bird out of this packaging!” And then, the “Web of Spider-Man” was, the CGC grading and what it was going for at market was about 250 U.S? And then the next one was “Thor” 339, that came in just during the last week and I went, that's too quick! It was only a 150 or something like that, it's like that's too quick! I don't want to open another Doug Sulipa package this soon. I want to exercise the wrist, but I don't want to torture myself. So I left it out back and sat and watched Rolly opening it this morning, and it's like, it's not my imagination these are really really tough packages to open. If you buy anything from Doug Sulipa's Comic World online, and you're going, “Gee, I hope he wraps it securely!” [laughs] Trust me. Don’t worry about it. Even the most psychotic postal worker could absolutely absolutely never damage a Doug Sulipa CGC graded book.
”#2, how big is your collection got?” I went and counted them, I got 16 of them now. So it seems like more, I've got them in the upstairs cupboard with a bunch of the Dave Sim file copies that I've got. And like I say, it seems like more, just because it's really cool to own all of them, and to know that as long as I keep doing “Cerebus in Hell?” I will always have more of them coming in. “#3, have you seen the value of any of them increase so much to say, ‘hmm, that was a good investment!’” That’s kind of a given right now. I haven't even checked it. I just told Doug like, I'm coming to the party a little late. By the time I found out about them, when the 2019 Overstreet Guide came out and suddenly there was a lot more talk about the Canadian price variants, and that they are price variants. They're not foreign editions, they're the same comic book with a different price on the front. So that puts them in the category of the 35 Cent “Star Wars” #1, which the prices have just gone berserk on. That's one of the most valuable, if not the most valuable, Bronze Age comic. So it's a matter of saying to Doug, you get me as much book as you can for the price and I'll leave it up to you as to which ones are the best bets. So consequently I'm not getting as good books, they're not as key books as they were, but I did get “Spider-Man” 252 with the black costume, and it's like, well, whatever I traded for that two years ago when I started doing this, I probably couldn't touch it now. It would be, uh no, you got that when it was possible for you to get that, you can't get that anymore. Same thing with the Archies, “Turtles” #1, the “Betty and Veronica” with the first Cheryl Blossom appearance, which is supposed to be the most valuable, or the third most valuable Canadian price variant. Well okay, so I got those when I got those. Doug will keep me in the game at whatever level he can keep me in the game. I'm not really checking to see how they're doing. I think they have to take root in the collecting environment for… well, one of the reasons that I say that I think that “Spider-Man” 252 is in a different category, and the “Thor” 337, the first Walt Simonson Thor, is in that category because the people who are obsessive collectors of Spider-Man and Thor, all of which are expanding populations because of the Marvel movies, as they find out about this it'll be, “Okay, I have to have at least a 9.2 or 9.6 ‘Thor’ 337 with the 75 cent cover price on it. How much is that going to cost me?” Well you're talking about a very small pool of copies, and you're talking about people who have them, and can afford to put whatever price that they want on them. Just like Blue Chip stocks, you're probably better off not checking that every day. Check that every six months, or if you can manage it, every two years or every three years, and you'll be pleasantly surprised. But I really can't recommend Doug Sulipa's Comic World any more highly in terms of, if you're spending the money, believe me, you will get the book in absolute perfect condition, and you will get it really really really really quickly. Which is really all you could ask for from somebody that you're buying CGC books from. Doug Sulipa, S-U-L-I-P-A.
Matt: There was a Heritage Auction around the time the issue 4 original art was coming out. I think it was one of the next auctions after that, they had a bunch of Canadian price variants listed, and I mean they were going for super cheap, but then again it's, you know, it's the only reason these books are in the auction is that they’re Canadian price variants. It's not that these are the key issues. Like I think there was a 252 in there, and that one went for money, but there was some stuff that you could get that, at the time I saw, it was like a dollar or two dollars, and I'm going, well you know, it's one of those, where some of these books are gonna be huge, and some of these books it’s going to be, “Well that book is worthless as an American Edition.”
Dave: Right. [laughs] Right. I mean that's why they call them key books is, key book evolves in the marketplace. The marketplace will tell you what a key book is. I think a lot of what's happening with Heritage Auctions now is, a lot of people who are buying on Heritage Auctions are buying for investment and they have absolutely no idea about comics whatsoever, they are just attracted to this environment where the hockey stick curve keeps staying a hockey stick curve. And consequently they just watch to see, “Okay, where does the bidding suddenly start going berserk? That's the one I want.” Which I think is what happened with the “Cerebus” #1 pages, as opposed to the later “Cerebus” page. The later “Cerebus” page went for a very respectable 1500 or whatever it was, but the “Cerebus” #1 pages went viral, went more viral than the complete Issue 4 and that just fed on itself. And it's like, you can't make that happen, but when that does happen it's like, well, okay, there you go. That's a lot of what I've been devoting my entire life to, is to try and have Cerebus considered valuable. And uh okay, that's a major credential in terms of a real world value. And yeah, I think there's still a toss-up between whether the Canadian price variants are the 35 Cent “Star Wars” #1 or they're just foreign editions. It's just, these are the ones that went to Canada. It's like, “I don't really have to have ‘Spider-Man’ 252 from Canada any more than I need the ‘Spider-Man’ 252 from South Africa. I know that they're there. I'm an obsessive Spider-Man collector, but I'm not that obsessive, or I'm not obsessive over in that direction.”
Matt: Well that's, trying to think, I have a “Spider-Man” #1, the Todd McFarland book, and all the Todd stuff is so weird for resale, because there's newsstand editions, and then there's the Direct Market edition, and the newsstand editions, for some reason, are worth more.
Dave: Yeah that makes sense because the newsstand stuff gets gets bent over forward on the spinner rack and stuff like that, so it's usually a much smaller market than the Direct Market, is the theory. Keep going, I interrupted.
Matt: Well, so like, when “Spider-Man” #1 came out, there were the five covers, and I managed to get two of them before my mom and my brother went, “It's the same damn comic. Why do you need all five?” I'm like, “Because there's five of them. It's neat!”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: You gotta, remember this is 1991, and I'm like 12 years old.
Dave: Right
Matt: And so I got the regular edition where it's colored, the Platinum Edition with the silver ink, and then like a year or two later we were some place and they had a five pack of all five issues. You know, at like a Kmart, and my brother and I each bought one because the “Spider-Man” #1 is worth money, and in that pack was a gold ink #1, which apparently because it's a newsstand edition, is the highest of all of them. And I'm going, you know it's one of those, like two or three years later my brother and I were selling a bunch of our comics cause we need money because you know we're poor teenagers, and he sold his and I think we paid five bucks for the pack and he sold his for 20 or 25. I still have mine, and I keep going, “I should really send this in and get it graded to see what kind of grade I can get.” But then I'm like, yeah, but I don't wanna be that kind of collector. But it was one of those, it's like there's money on the on the table and you're leaving it there. You have two other copies, it's not like you can't read the story!
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. It's like, that's why the the market dictates where that's going to go. It's like, uh no you could you can say that, and you can try and stick to it, but you're going to probably eventually argue yourself out of that and go, “Okay I'm not that kind of collector, but some things I've got to be that kind of collector, because not being that kind of collector is, like you say, leaving money on the table.” The same as J.R. was up visiting from Texas the end of August, and he told me that he's a former store owner and art collector and comic collector, and he wanted to put an addition on his house, I think it was? And it was, he had bought a page from a “Giant-Sized X-Men” where Dave Cockrum introduced the new X-Men and he paid Cockrum, I think, 100 for the page at the time? And he ended up selling it for, whatever it was, 35,000 or something.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And it's like, well, there you go! Are you gonna say, “J.R., that makes you that kind of collector!” It's like, well, do you want an addition on your house or you do not want an addition? At the same time, you'll never be able to buy that page back. You'll never get it for 35,000 again
Matt: And that's, like, one of the things in my collection that it's something that I have that I do not necessarily want and I definitely don't need it, and it's on my pile of, “Okay, this is something I should go and get graded because I don't have any graded books but this is a book I can see paying to grade” is, “The Umbrella Academy” first appeared in a Free Comic Book Day from Dark Horse. It was a Free Comic Book Day issue. And I have one, and it doesn't have a stamp from the store on it, and you know it's in fairly good condition. And my friend who I let store stuff in my basement has one, and I kind of told him like, “I might be taking that as rent” and he's like, “Yeah whatever, I don't need it.” So I have two of them and I kinda want to send them in because if they're in good grade I know I can flip them for hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, because it's “The Umbrella Academy”, it's the biggest thing since sliced bread!
Dave: Right.
Matt: You know, people that are into that kinda thing. Like my niece! I don't care. [laughs]
Dave: Right. Right. I mean it's, the leverage is always there, and then it's, I mean, my theory all along has been never sell artwork you can't replace for money that you don't need. And it's like, well, we're getting into an interesting time period now where it's like, well, define “need”. The inflation is kicking shit out of everything, pardon my French, but if this is the only thing that's appreciating and everything else that you've got in your life is depreciating and costing more for the same thing, then okay, that's still a solid theory. Don't sell a rare comic book that you can't replace, for money that you don't need. And try to define your own needs correctly. One of the kids needing a new cell phone? That's not a need! [laughs] “No, you can't have Dad’s Spirit comic book to buy another cell phone. You've got a cell phone.” All of that kind of thing.
Matt: It's one of those, I wanna get them graded not so much so I can sell them now, it's just a, get them graded so I know that, okay, yeah this actually is what I think it is, unlike like my two sets of “Brat Pack” because “Brat Pack”, that's the greatest comic series ever! That's worth millions! And it's like, no, the “Brat Pack” is relatively cheap. If you've come across it, you're not gonna be breaking the piggy bank to get it, but at the same time when I got into “Brat Pack”, it was, oh yeah, “Brat Pack”s the greatest thing since sliced bread, I have to have a second set of these!
Dave: Right. Right. Yeah, it's all kinds of different decisions. Okay, moving on to Ian!
Matt: Whoa, whoa! One last Canadian price variant thing, you do have “Amazing” 233, which ironically is the first time I ever encountered Cerebus, in a Bud Plant ad.
Dave: [laughs] Really?
Matt: Yeah!
Dave: How about that! I have to go and crack the case open now, so that I could see that. No no no! You don't want to do that.
Matt: I could just send you a fax of my copy. [laughs]
Dave: That's a much better idea. That's a much better idea, now that we've figured out how to get the faxes light enough so that I can see what's there. You done good with the latest one, which we're coming up on, but we're not there yet.
Ian asks, “Hi Dave, it's Ian from Louisiana!” Hello Ian. “I hope you're doing well.” Yes, thank you. “I saw an interview years ago during the ’Following Cerebus’ days, you mentioned the possibility of a volume collecting all miscellaneous Cerebus material that was feasible. I've heard your reply before on the Epic stuff and I understand the issues with that, but has there been any more thought given to a volume 17, or the…” [laughs] How do you pronounce this? Aardvark… aardvarkgriffa… Aardvarkrypha? That’s good coined term. “Can we have our Aardvarkrypha volume, please, Grandpa.” as I like to call it. There's thought given to it. We just solicited, the Damond Previews came in today with “The Last Day” solicited as a Remastered Edition, so that's going to be dovetailing with the Waverly Press hardcover. We have to see how that goes. It has to be, have we figured out how to do both of those so that they get to people in a timely manner and they get the Diamond in a timely manner? And it's not tying up a lot of Aardvark-Vanaheim’s currency, and Waverly's currency, waiting to get those things to work together. So the short answer to your question would be, and this applies to your second question, “Will there ever be a color volume collecting all the various ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ cover homages in full size similar to the IDW covers collection?”, we have to figure out how to make Waverly Press and Aardvark-Vanaheim and Diamond Comics work together and dovetail in such a way that it makes business sense to do that. Which is probably going to involve, like I say, we'll do “The Last Day”, and it's okay, this is, when Diamond Previews comes into Aardvark-Vanaheim and I look in it, and I go, okay, this is middle of October, and here it is. So this is the beginning of the process. At what point do people get those books? Did they get the Waverly Press Edition that they ordered on Kickstarter? Did the stores get them from Diamond, and when did that happen? And if it's, “well okay, they got the Diamond Edition in June of next year, and they got the Waverly Edition just in time for Christmas next year” and it's like, well, okay let's not do one of those again until we figure out how to move those dates backward so it makes more sense. Not just say, “Well, we're certainly going to try and do that.” Uh, no, we got to have a different plan than what we did last time. Dagon, what do you propose? Matt at Diamond, how do you see this working with Diamond? And let's start from, this is what happened with “The Last Day”, this is unacceptable from Aardvark-Vanaheim's point of view. How do we make it if not completely acceptable, less unacceptable, and then gradually work from there. It's not like we have a shortage of projects. Dagon said that the 1982 Tour Book is is virtually done. It's all put together. When we're going to do it is, again, going to depend on what's Waverly's deliverology, as they call it, on “The Last Day”, and the next one that Dagen is doing is going to be the ashcan for Turtles 8, which has gotten bumped forward, the Kickstarter for Turtles 8 is now in March, because that's the earliest Heritage Auction. Signature auction with the catalog is first, second week of March 2023, so we want the Kickstarter to be going at the same time as the Heritage Auction. I'm going to be talking to the Todd Hignite at Heritage, going, is there some way… like, I don't want to interfere with the Heritage Auction, but is there some way that we can change my name to Dave Zim instead of Dave Sim so that I have the last listing in one of the sessions, and when the session is over, you go, because the next session doesn't start until the next May, could you plug our Kickstarter? You know, if you didn't manage to get one of the three Turtles original covers, here’s Dave’s descriptions of the covers from the giant size trading cards that we're doing. Hey everybody from Heritage Auctions, head on over to the Turtles Kickstarter and don't miss out on all of your 750 or 912 variant covers. No, it won't be that many! There will be a number of variant covers and it's like, it's probably pushing it with Heritage Auctions, and just no harm in asking. It would really really help to have all of the Heritage people finding out, “Just click this link to this Kickstarter” right in the middle of our Kickstarter, so we already have the first two weeks under our belts, and whoa, look at the numbers go now!
So, speaking of numbers going now, I have a prayer time coming up in five minutes, so we're at that time of year where we have to split these up into two sections. Hold your thought! I know you had something to say about the Heritage Auctions things, and we'll pick up from there when my prayer time’s over.
Matt: Will do!
Dave: Okay. I'll call you back.
Matt: Alright bye!
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: So, please hold for Dave Sim!
[guitar music]
Matt: Hello again, Dave!
Dave: Hello again, Matt! Okay, what did you have to say about the CGC thing?
Matt: Oh no no no, what I was going to say was, I was gonna confirm the last I heard is the ashcans going on sale November 3rd.
Dave: That's what I heard as well.
Matt: The way I heard it, it was your decision.
Dave: [laughs] Well, I got it presented to me, and it was like, well, the fact that there wasn't going to be a Heritage Auction in January, which is what I was hoping for. Although a part of me knew, well, okay the first Heritage signature auction is at the very earliest in February. I've never really heard of a January, but it's like, well maybe, there’s a first time for everything. The fact that it wasn't even in February, it's gonna be in March, suddenly you've got a long jump from the last Kickstarter, which was the 6-7/78 “Cerebus” #4 and the “Pieces of Turtles 8.2”. That's another one of those timeline things. This is, Grandma’s earning his living these days. It's very nice to get the large chunk of money, which I think that Kickstarter was August, when it was actually held, and then just a week or so ago was when we have confirmation that the portfolios are arriving, so consequently I am comfortable with getting Rolly to deposit the money order in the bank account. So it was definitely a good chunk. 25,000 U.S. and I'm gambling that the Canadian dollar has had dropped about as low as it's going to go, and deposited all of it into the Canadian account. So the 25,000 U.S. became 33,000 Canadian, but that's, okay well, how long does that money have to last? I paid the printing bill from Studiocomix Press was about 8,000 and then another 4,500 for Rolly’s labour, and the packaging and stuff like that, all of the raw materials. What I'm waiting for is the bill from Packaging Too for the shipping. Also had to pay the Off-White House house insurance for the year, which always comes due in September, and that went up from 3,500 to 4,500, which it's very nice to know that I have a far more valuable Off-White House than I did, but since I'm not selling it, that's just another chunk. So, then it's a matter of, okay, how long does that money have to last? And it's one thing to say, okay, gotta hang on until Kickstarter in March, and the Heritage Auction in March. [laughs] I'm not gonna get it in March. It's going to be March, April, May, possibly June, before I can actually deposit it. And it's like, yeah! I think a Turtles 8 ashcan sounds like a wonderful idea! Because Dagon is definitely he's talking about, “Are you willing to sign them?” and it's like, “Because if you're willing to sign them, then I'll do them through Alfonso and Rolly can do the shipping. If you're not gonna sign them, then I'll probably get them printed closer to home.” And it's like, well, Alfonso and Rolly and I are working really well together in terms of turning this stuff around, so hopefully the money that comes in on November 3rd. Aarvark-Vanaheim will actually be depositing its share, mhmm, maybe by the first couple of weeks in January, or by the end of January, and topping up whatever is left of the Kickstarter from July and August. We're getting better at this and I'm learning to get less paranoid about money, but one of the ways that I keep myself less paranoid about money is by still living like a poor person. Grandpa's still buying his Dollar Store tuna. [laughs] We're not going crazy with the spending because, it's like, well, you tell me how bad inflation is going to get, and I'll tell you what I'm comfortable spending. And it's, “Well we have no idea.” Well, okay then, but I have no idea either.
And we heard from Margaret Liss! ”Second page of the notebook I show there page 149. I can't find where those page sketches and dialogue were used. A scene not used? Why not? Thanks.” And got that through on the fax, thank you. And taking a closer look at it, and then Margaret actually relayed what her reading was on the page, and I went, right! It is the death of Weisshaupt, which I couldn't find, because I thought it was around issue 76. It was an unused scene from the death of Weisshaupt issue. And, no, it was earlier than that when I was still asking myself questions about, okay, well, which do I want to do? Do I want to build a suspense of “Is Weisshaupt going to make it, or is he sinking fast? Is he going to die? When is he going to die?” And it was difficult at the time because that was just coming off of the short stories that I hadn't done before. It's like, I want to give the ambiance of everything that's going on in “Church & State” without having to get bogged down in large blocks of text, although I'm gonna use those as well. So when I'm jumping around, do I jump to Weisshaupt and then someplace else, and then back to Weisshaupt and then someplace else? Because there's X number of pages that I've got before I really have to start dealing with the Ascension itself, and how many of those pages can I devote to Weisshaupt? So it was, I think I can devote about an issue to Weisshaupt. So do I do part of an issue with Weisshaupt dying, or do I do the foreshadowing, “Is he gonna make it? Is he not going to make it?” and then just use up part of an issue. And after the point where I wrote that page, and sort of sketched in that page, I looked at it and went, okay, how much does this advance the story and how much is this in order to build attention and the apprehension about this very important central character dying? Where do I want to be putting that? And that was when I made the decision. Looking at the sketch that you're talking about, I liked the mannequin style head with Weisshaupt’s powdered wig on it and that was about the only part of the sequence that I thought, okay, this is really advancing it. He's not conscious, he's not really coherent, so it's just people talking about him. The pacing would convey what I want to convey, but pacing is eating up pages and eating up panels in order to convey the seriousness of this character dying or not dying. And ultimately decided, no, I think I want to take all of the pages and put them into 76. The kind of pacing that I'm talking about doing right when Weisshaupt is dying, I want Cerebus to come and see him, and I want all of the moody panels, the silent panels that have the pacing that I'm picturing in my head, Cerebus as a silhouette against Weisshaupt’s library shelves. I know exactly how I wanted to play it, and it's like, no, it's going to be better all there. As an example, somebody at the level of influence of Weisshaupt, as a level of importance of Weisshaupt, it would be a much lengthier process once Cerebus got there in the carriage… [sneezes] excuse me. Once Cerebus got there in the carriage to actually get in to see Weisshaupt, it would be, there's layers between the walking off of the street and getting in to see Weisshaupt, and you'll notice that apart from the large panel of Cerebus being welcomed, and “Weisshaupt has things to tell you”, it goes right from there to just Cerebus and Weisshaupt. Again, there would probably be hangers-on in the vicinity, that Weisshaupt would have to get rid of once Cerebus was there and he could see that it wasn't a major security problem and he just didn’t want to explain it to Cerebus. So, yeah, it was one of those times that I went, I need to use up a lot of pages on this to have the correct tone for it, and I think I want to be very stingy and a little clever about not having the setup go exactly the way it would go in that situation, and just really cut to the chase, but the chase is really really slow, which lots of slow panels and very skimpy dialogue. And it worked in that sense. But the same as Cerebus has the physical confrontation with the dying Weisshaupt , and I’m picturing how to do that, and going, well, I've got himin bed and dying/not dying and if he's actually dying and he dies in issue 76, how do I get him out of the bed? He's got to be sitting up for he and Cerebus to have confrontation that they do. The size of bed that he'd have, Cerebus is not going to be able to reach him from the side of the bed. And so that's the thinking that you're looking at where, okay, this would be good, but it's not accomplishing what I need to accomplish. So jettison this part, and front load this part over here.
Matt: Which is kind of weird now that I think about it, because if that sequence had been put in, it would have been another one of those motifs through the whole series. Because it's Weisshaupt dying in bed, there’s Melmoth dying in bed, there's Cirin in “Mothers & Daughters” injured in bed, possibly dying, there's sort of the opening of “Guys” when Cerebus is really drunk and they're moving him around for the Squinteye and Pluto signing, where there's somebody who's unconscious but they're talking around him, and then it all leads up to “The Last Day” where Cerebus is in bed. I mean it's one of them throughlines that just I never really thought about it, but now like I got a week's worth of blog posts. Thanks, Dave! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Well, you're quite welcome, Matt. Yeah, it is one of those, you know, being conscious of that, do I want a jettison that? And, well no, it would be nice to have that through-continuity, you're setting everything setting yourself up for, “Okay, how does Cerebus smack Weisshaupt if he's in the middle of a President-sized bed?” And it's, uh well, nobody noticed because they didn't get to see that part and go, “Okay, I can't really believe how you did that.”
Okay! And moving on to Rick Norwood, and boy, now we get into serious, serious comic art metaphysics, because, okay, I've got got Rick Norwood’s question, and I'm going to interrupt to at the beginning to to front load this. Rick Norwood is publisher of “Comics Revue”, R-E-V-U-E, and Rick Norwood was the first person to break Dave Sim’s consecutive issue record according to Rick. “Comics Revue” is gonna get its issue 300 coming up. [laughs] And I didn't know what to say to Rick about that, just as I didn't know what to say to Todd about that, that you're gonna break my record. I don't think you're doing the same thing that I'm doing, but you know, I do want to say, and I do very emphatically say to both Rick Norwood and Todd, congratulations and well done! There's no easy way to do 300 issues of anything, and anybody doing 300 issues of something, [applauds] deserves a nice round of applause from Dave Sim. Rick Norwood is at, the latest issue of “Comics Revue” I had come in was, he does double issues now to keep the price down was about 435/436. And let me just say to Rick, who I hope will be listening, that I'm definitely looking forward to the October issue, # 437/438, particularly the continuation of Lee Falk and Phil Davis's Mandrake the Magician ”The Museum Mystery” from 1940. Definitely a peak form for both of those guys, Lee Falk writing Mandrake the Magician and Phil Davis drawing Mandrake the Magician. Phil Davis, Alex Raymond clone, and I gotta say looking at it going, sweating blood to at least match Raymond's Secret Agent X-9, and he's definitely very very close. All of these guys had the same experience with Raymond that I had lifelong experience with Neal Adams, “Can I just match what he was doing 40 years ago? I don't even have to catch up to him now, just 40 years ago would make me deliriously happy.” And you can see Phil Davis is the same way, a good five years after Alex Raymond left Secret Agent X-9, going, “Why can't I do this? I mean, it's, I see what he's doing. I want to do it myself, and I'm sweating blood, and it's just not as good as he is.” Well, this “Museum Mystery” from 1940 is about as close as you can get. And it's, you know, these are continued stories, and it's a great thing when I do get hooked on one of these stories, there's complete stories in “Comics Revue”, usually three of them per issue, and then the rest of them are continued. You get part two, or you get part one or whatever, and if you get stuck on one and I'm stuck on “The Museum Mystery” from 1940, as soon as it comes in it's like, okay, I'm not gonna read the whole thing, because “Comics Review” is like 120 pages per issue, so I gotta pick my spots, but I want to see Phll Davis sweating blood more and how this “Museum Mystery” wraps up. A lot of fun. The Phantom story was complete in this issue, where the Phantom becomes the world champion boxing champion as The Masked Marvel, and really wildly wildly implausible, but really fun stories, and it's got a happy ending on it! They didn't believe in unhappy endings back then. No, it looks like everything's going unhappily between him and his girlfriend, but they end up together in the jungle at the end. So if you're tired of all of these morose 21st century “stories”, you can't go too far wrong with Rick Norwood's “Comics Revue”.
So, moving on to what Rick said, “And I am rereading Prince Valiant from the beginning to the present day. This is something all of you could do!” and he's talking to all of you listeners, “At least for the Hal Foster years. Although maybe not in the full page size, which I am privileged to have in my collection.” Yes, we're all jealous as heck, Rick. “They are so good. I can't resist sharing a few of the best. This post is political. Don't read the script if your mind is closed on subjects political.” And then okay here we're going to get to Rick Norwood’s political assertion, “Most people who think seriously about politics agree that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government. Examples, Julius and Augustus Caesar, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II. The trouble with benevolent dictatorship is that for every one benevolent dictator, there have been 99 malevolent or incompetent dictators. As Sir Winston Churchill pointed out, ’democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.’ Prince Valiant is so good, so far and away the best story strip ever that I hope it survives. But then I think about politics because I hope the human race survives.” And an added, “PS, hi, Dave Sim. Your thoughts?”
Matt: Okay, let me stop you there real quick. So this was a post in the Cerebus Facebook group where it was the Prince Valiant image with what Rick said, and then he commented, “Hi Dave Sim, what do you think?” and I'm like, well since I'm doing the faxs anyway, I'll put this in.
Dave: There you go. Well, okay! So, it's a three-way courtship of comic art metaphysics because, where's his name here, Travis H, who is actually in Trego, Wisconsin. September 24th he mails me a comic strip that has a Please Hold for Dave Sim question at the end of it, obviously thinking if he mailed it from Wisconsin, September 24th, it’ll get there in time for the first Thursday in October, not knowing that we were gonna skip a week. And Rolly picked up the mail today, so I open up this envelope from Travis, and it's got a hand-drawn comic strip in it, which Rolly has scanned and emailed to you to put on Please Hold for Dave Sim. And I'm looking at what Rick Norwood had to say, and I'm thinking, okay, I got a rough idea of what I'm gonna say about this, but not specifically. Let's let's open up the other mail that we got here. So I opened up Travis's package and it was a comic strip where I went, actually that says a lot of what I would have to say to Rick. How about that? There's a weird comic art metaphysics thing. Now I've got Travis's letter here somewhere… I hope I do. [papers shuffle] Well I can't find it. But anyway, he recreated two panels from “Detective” 27, Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel's spy story, first two panels, and then he did a panel from one of Steve Ditko's comics, and then he put the Please Hold question at the end , and the dialogue that he wrote into these panels is from a book called “The Iron Heel” by Jack London, 1908, and it's “The future”. “The people of that age were phrase-slaves. The abjectness of their servitude was incomprehensible to us. There was a magic in words… greater than the conjurer's art. So befuddled and chaotic were their minds that the utterance of a single word could negative the generalizations of a lifetime of serious research and thought. Such a word was the adjective utopian. The mere utterance of it could damn any scheme no matter how sanely conceived. Vast populations grew frenzied over such phrases such as ‘an honest dollar’ and ‘a full dinner paid’. The coinage of such phrases were considered strokes of genius.” And it's like, that's very well said. That's very well said. And then he's got a panel from Steve ditko's Mr A, “Now”, and it's ”Misogynist… Nazi… -phobe… -phobe… -phobe…” It's like, pick a noun, put “phobe” on the end of it, and it's exactly that thing. It's a single word could negative the generalizations of a lifetime of serious research and thought. [laughs] And we really really need to knock it off, I think. So, that having been said, then I can go on to, okay it's this is still way way too too big a subject that Rick has presented me with here. So as I always try to do, it's like, okay, type it out on the laptop so that you can keep it confined, because if you just start talking, you're just going to jibber at these people poor people and you've already been jibbering at them for almost two hours.
So what I had to say, Rick, is, Julius and Augustus Ceaser were no one's idea of benevolent. The dictator ultimately always has to kill his opponents. The more opponents he kills, the more opponents he creates. Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Elizabeth II (and on the latter may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, and God save the King), were titular heads. The latter more than the former. Parliamentary democracy and English invention supersedes monarchical dictatorship. As a monotheist, aligning with what I see as God's master clockwork mechanism, so long as the will of the people individually and collectively is expressed, everything proceeds however fitfully to where we are going. More ladders than snakes. Anything that oppresses, suppresses, or invalidates the will of the people is doomed to failure because it keeps us from where we are going. Freedom of expression can only be slowed, it can't be stopped. The Shah is replaced by the Ayatollah because the Ayatollah is a more honest expression of the will of the people. The people in this case being Shiite Muslims in 1979. 44 years later, the will of the people reverts back in the direction of the Shah. Turkey has ping ponged back and forth through most of the last century on this definition of true Islam. It becomes the iron fist and then it relaxes, and it becomes the iron fist and relaxes, not relative to Western democracy, it never relaxes. It's always just the iron fist. But in their own context, that's the situation. So applying this to Aleta, Queen of the Misty Isles, “First she makes everyone happy, except her treasurer, by reducing taxes. The mounting prosperity of her kingdom will more than make up the loss.” Well this works up to a point. The point where you need to invent unimaginably large amounts of money to keep the game going. But we're long past that point relative to the debts we the people owe. The taxes collected aren’t a drop in a bucket. Something has to give, but we're not sure what. “Next, she punishes several overly ambitious citizens.” “Overly ambitious” is a subjective viewpoint. King George III would have regarded George Washington as “overly ambitious”. Washington's personal ambition was beside the point. He and the Continental Congress's intellectual ambition was to work as quickly as possible towards a refinement of parliamentary democracy to limit the ability of government to interfere in the expression of God-given free will. The first of all moral, and second of all material success, of appropriate ambition attained to, speaks for itself. “Queen Aleta appoints a Congress of men from all walks of life.” An appointed Congress can only be an arbitrary Congress, and God's will expressed through the trial and error of His creations. “Men of well thinking” being the more literal translation of the more popular “Men of good will” is anything but arbitrary, and can't be coerced.
Getting back to the comic art metaphysics of this, Travis had just gotten a Winsor Newton Series 7 #2 brush in the mail, and had decided to start working on this comic strip that he was working on to test out his Winsor Newton series seven #2 brush. And at the exact time that he was doing that, he was reading the Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and he got to the page with Raymond sharpening the brush and went, “Hey, thanks for the tip!”
Matt: I actually printed that page out when I was doing the Matisse cover of, okay! I know how to Ink now! And it's like, yeah, I didn't buy a Winsor Newton series seven #2 sable hair brush, I bought the $4, “Hey it's got a #2 on the back of it someplace” brush, and went, I dunno what I’m doing! But at the same time it's like, well, I can't screw it up because I'm pretty much doing this for myself and if I don't like it, nobody sees it, and if I kind of like it, I'll show people, and if I really like it, I'll ask for money.
Dave: Right.
Matt: But yeah, that is kind of a weird, within two, three weeks of each other, all this stuff's happening. [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, and then all swirled around today, and all fell into place exactly at the time that it needed to. Which, to me, is that's when you know that you're on the right track of something, because you're aligning yourself with God's clockwork mechanism, you're not freelancing. Not going, “Let's see if I can get away with this.” It's God! You can't get away with anything. How are you going to get away with something with someone who's omniscient? So getting to Travis's Please Hold for Dave Sim question, in the last panel he's got Little Orphan Annie asking Dave Sim, “Mr Sim, why did you start using the Kubert font rather than having one created from your own lettering?” Because I like the Kubert font better than my own lettering. First of all, it's technically better. I always wanted to be able to letter like a newspaper strip letterer in the classic days, you know the letters that they had at Marvel. Tom Orzechowski, when I first knew of him, he was, I saw his lettering in “Media Five”, I think I've told this story before, but I went, it looks like comic book lettering. Mine looks nice and it's very expressive, and it's got its own quality to it, but if I was to hand letter Rip Kirby, or if I was to hand letter an Al Williamson Warren story, I would just be dragging the whole thing down. It would be, uh don't do that. A good professional lettering look is, a rising tide floats all boats, You've already made things easier on yourself just by going in that direction. Speaking as a writer, I can change stuff a lot more easily and… like that doesn't answer the “why wouldn't I have it created from my own lettering?” It's, I'm doing the Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and I really wanted to be in the same category as Heart of Juliet Jones, Rip Kirby, Al Williamson's Secret Agent X-9, all of those strips definitely had the classic lettering style to it, so the automatic leg up for what it is that I'm doing visually that comes from using the Kubert font, and the fact that I'm able to write and letter simultaneously. When I'm mocking up the pages, particularly the last week or so, I'm dealing with very very intricate subjects where I'm going, [laughs] okay, that I understand what I'm talking about, but nobody else has a frame of reference for this, so how do I explain what I know in my head so that it all fits on this page? And then I sit down and type it out uh as individual captions, and then print it out on my printer, and cut out the lettering, and glue it with masking tape, just rolls of masking tape, I roll it up so that I can just stick it on the back and then stick it lightly to the page, and then read it. Does this say what I want to say? Because the first thing's been taken care of, yes, it all fits on this page, that's my biggest concern. What panels am I going to excerpt from Rip Kirby and use them to illustrate what's in the captions? Okay, I have a pretty good idea what that is. Now are there pieces missing from the concept that I'm trying to convey? And it's like, usually there is, because what specifically I'm trying to say isn’t the problem that I'm solving at the time. The problem that I'm solving is, does this all fit in one place? Once that's solved, then I get to, okay, what am I actually saying here? And usually it's a situation where, okay, this has a nice word rhythm to it, but these two sentences that I have in one caption are going to be better if they're two different captions. At which time I go, okay, does everything still fit on the page? Yes it does, but I have to move it around a little bit so that I've got a room for the two captions that used to be one caption. A lot of time I start reading it and I go, oh okay, I need to go across the panel. So I need to put this caption on this side of the panel that I photocopied out of the Rip Kirby book, and then I have to read the Rip Kirby panel, and then I have to pick up on the internal logic of what's in the panel, or sometimes quote what's in the panel, because it's like, okay, you were just reading this as a panel from a comic strip, but there's a larger sense being conveyed here. So I'm gonna have to quote it in a caption so you have “here's the original caption or word balloonm here's me quoting it, here's me explaining why this is more important than just ‘This is Ward Greene getting Alex Raymond from panel one to panel three, so he needs to say this in panel two.’” That's far easier to do when I'm looking at something that already looks like a classic newspaper strip. Heart of Juliet Jones went back and forth, Stan Drake tried a number of different things and tried machine lettering. And, boy you really notice it, it's just a completely different voice when I was looking at his originals at Syracuse University. And it was hand lettered before that, but he's going, “No it's slowing me down. I have to get one of the guys in Connecticut that does lettering to do my lettering and that's taking up you know a day or two that if I can just find a way to print out the lettering myself and stick it in, then that's an extra two days for the drawing.” And it's like, boy I can see the argument, because looking at it I'm going, yeah the the extra day or the extra two days that he had for inking and penciling are definitely in the strip exactly the way he intended it, but boy does the lettering ever look lousy. And that's one of those, once you're doing it yourself you go, okay, you don't want to trade this for that, you're trading too much for too little.
I appreciate the the implied compliment when people say, “Yyou know, why didn't you get just your own your own lettering font created that you could do on the laptop?” It's, uh, no, I'd be talking about Alex Raymond and Ward Greene and Stan Drake and Al Williamson and Neal Adams and all of these guys in a very intense, very specific way, and reading it in Cerebus' voice. And it's like, no, Cerebus is Cerebus, that's where it belongs, this belongs in Strange Death of Alex Raymond.
Matt: I think it was in “Glamourpuss” or around the time of “Glamourpuss” where somebody said, “Why aren't you hand lettering?” and you're like, because you want it to like Ben Oda lettered it, and the closest you found was the Kubert font.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And that, I mean…
Dave: Yeah, and that's entirely true. I'm not sure what it was about the Kubert font, but it was, uh no, that's the look that I want, because I did see a Ben Oda font later on, I don't know if Comicraft had done it, and I went, that's Ben Oda! That's the guy who had the keys to pretty much every cartoonist’s house in Connecticut so he could let himself in and sit down and do the lettering while they were sleeping. And no, I like the Kubert font better, which is surprising because I never really noticed Joe's lettering on the stuff that he lettered himself. And I think that had to do with the fact that DC Comics had some of the best letterers at the time. Gasper Saladino and people like that, and those are the guys who lettered all of Kubert's “Our Army at War” and “Sgt. Rock” and stuff. So it's like, I would look at Joe's lettering on his own work, his independent work that he was doing outside of DC, and it's like, [laughs] “Couldn't you have gotten Gaspar Saladino to letter it? It’ll look so much better, cause it just goes together like ham and eggs.” And it's like, not having seen the Kubert font apart from Joe's lettering himself, it's like as soon as I saw it apart, it's like wow! That's more Ben Oda than Ben Oda. Maybe I need to look at a Gaspar Saladino font.
Matt: I wonder if there is one. I'm sure there is!
Dave: [laughs] I'm sure there is. I mean, I always think, well okay, things don't move along quite that rapidly and thoroughly until… David Birdsong’s faxing me pages from “Aardvarkian Splendor” and it's like, well, son of a gun, of course there's a Robert Crumb font! How many guys are doing indie comics and underground comix and they just ache to look like like Robert Crumb. Well okay, here's your leg up. It's not the best font in the world, but it's very very authentically Robert Crumb.
Matt: I forget the name of the website, there was a site that was doing it where you could create your own font, and it was free, but once you created it, it got put into their database of fonts, and when they've reached a certain threshold, then they were gonna to start charging people.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I printed out the template, and I was like, I really should go through old “Cerebus” comics and work out a Dave font, and it was one of those, it’s like, yeah, but at the same time, you know, is it worth it to do it? And then I'm pretty sure Sean ended up having to make an early Cerebus font for the remastering, because there were, you know, the P’s that look like D's, and replacing some of them and fixing some of the errors that were in the first volume, I believe he might have made one. And I've asked him, like, did you make one? And he never really responds when I ask!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Which leads me to believe that the answer is, “Yes, but you can't have it”. [laughs]
Dave: Which is, shortsighted, I mean, that’s up to whoever made the font. We know it's going that way. I mean, I don't think Grandpa is going to be in the ground too long before somebody goes, “He's dead? Really? Okay, I get to do my Cerebus stories now!” And here's the Dave Sim font and they're gonna talk themselves into the fact that, “Yep. I'm showing Dave Sim how it's done.” Just as I keep hoping that I can do that with Neal Adams, I will show Neal Adams how Neal Adams is done properly.
Matt: So, that kind of segues into something that just happened to me this afternoon. When I was getting out of work, I got an alert from Heritage about a Dave Sim piece that was coming up for auction, and I looked at it, went, well, how much is it going for? It was only at a dollar, so I'm like, alright, I'll throw some money at this, and it's an original undated piece by Wayne Robinson and Dave Sim. It's a… [sighs], I'm trying to phrase this nicely in case you're the one that drew it, but I think Wayne might have been. It's a homage, if you will, to the Batman on the cover of “Detective” 241 or “Batman” 241, I forget what the description was. And it's very much a Neal Adams knockoff that very much looks like it's not Neal Adams. And it's colored, so I don't know if you drew it and he colored it, or if you colored it and he drew it, or if one of you inked it, one of you penciled it, or what, but right now, last I checked, I'm winning at 26 bucks. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] When does the auction close?
Matt: I don't know, but I'm hoping if I tell everybody “I'm bidding on this, you gotta let this one go!” I mean, it's not a great piece of art, but I think it's gonna have it's one of those were its got that pedigree of, this is early pre-Cerebus Dave Sim, and/or this is Dave at a convention being real nice to the guy at the table next to him who's like, “Hey, could you color this?”
Dave: Oh well, no no no no, Wayne Robinson was a collector in town when I was still living at my parents place, still in the basement, and doing comics but mostly just being a comic collector nerd in my parents’ basement. Wayne Robinson lived over in Forest Heights and was married and had I think two kids at the time, and met him at Now and Then Books. [laughs] Because that's where I spent my life was drinking Harry's tea in the kitchen for free at Now and Then Books when it was at 103 Queen Street South. And met Wayne Robinson, and he was one of the few guys that knew all of the same stuff that I did about Golden Age DC Comics and was a collector of Golden Age DC Comics. So it's like, wow! Here's a guy that I can show off to! “Look at my ‘Superman’ #10, and my ‘Superman’ #22, and my ‘World's Finest’ #7!” And invited him over to my parents place, and that was weird having somebody visiting me who was probably closer to my Dad's age than my age at the time. But the shared comics interest at the time when it was very clandestine and illicit, was baked in on that. So I think the situation was that either he copied the figure and I inked and coloured it, or I copied the figure and he inked and coloured it. I'd be willing to bet he doesn't know either. I saw him at the local comic shop… how long ago, would that be six years ago? Five years ago? And he goes, “I bet you don't remember the name Wayne Robinson” [laughs] and I went, “Are you kidding? You were the major DC fan! You were the guy that I could talk to about ‘World's Finest’ #7 having the first appearance of Batman with his white snow costume, and an appearance by the Golden Age Sandman in the back, and this is ‘Superman’ 17, with the first appearance of the Fortress of Solitude. And you can nod and go, ‘And what about the first appearance of Mister Mxyztplk in ‘Cerebus’ #30?” “Yeah, yeah! That wasn't actually on the cover, and it was spelled differently in the first appearance. The second appearance for some reason Jerry Siegel changed the…” and we could just talk for hours like that because it's like, wow, this is exactly like talking to somebody in my head.
Matt: [laughs] The piece is signed by both of ya, so if I win, I'll let you know.
Dave: Okay!
Matt: I mean I'll probably grab the image off of Heritage and send it to Rolly to print out in color and show you, and be like, “Oh yeah, I never wanted to see that Batman again.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Well, I’d be interested to see it just from the standpoint of, I don't remember this, and well how about that? Because obviously I did it. Where would somebody counterfeiting a Dave Sim come up with the name Wayne Robinson?
Matt: Well, it's from the Darren Shan collection, so I'm sure that Darren didn't just buy it because somebody had scribbled your name on it.
Dave: Right. Right. Okay! I think that's a wrap, Matt. Let's see if I'm missing anything here. I think.. no, we got all the way to the end! So…
Matt: And let's see, yeah I gave away all my October surprises during this, so I have nothing else at the end.
Dave: Aww.
Matt: Oh wait! Wait wait, I do! I forgot. I even wrote a note to ask. So the Flash Gorden volumes you have, are those are the Kitchen Sink Press ones?
Dave: Uh, no, they're the IDW.
Matt: Oh okay. See I have the inferior old Kitchen Sink Press thinner volumes.
Dave: Yeah, we don't even walk across the street to throw rocks at those.
Matt: [laughs] I don't know if I ever told you this, so years ago I was doing something, and I had a Kitchen Sink book, and I mentioned the name Denis Kitchen to my Mom, and my Mom went, “Oh, I went to college with him” and I'm like, what?! “Oh yeah!” and she you know was telling me…
Dave: Oh! You’re down in Wisconsin! Right, right!
Matt: And I'm like, what? “Oh yeah, we had a creative writing class together and he was one of the guys in the class.” I'm like well, okay what what do you know about this? I mean, major figure in comics in Matt's mind, some guy she kinda knew in college in my Mom's mind. I’m like, you gotta have some stories, Mom! “Uh, he gave great notes in our creative writing class, and he was kind of a weirdo, but other than that, no, I don't really remember him.” And I thought at one point she said that like he had asked her out on a date and she had turned him down. And it’s one of those, every time Denis Kitchen's name comes up, I'm like, oh yeah my Mom went to college with him. People are like, “Really?!” and if they're in the comics I'm like, yeah! “What was he like?” She really doesn't have any stories. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] That’s hilarious. Yeah, we always think that famous comic book people just sort of appear out of thin air at some point. It's like, no, we got backstories of people who famously ignored us.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Quick story! I gotta go because the last prayer time is coming up at two minutes to eight.
Matt: Okay!
Dave: The plumber that I had in, I don't know if I got Rolly to send you the picture. The plumber came in to do some plumbing stuff that I've been putting off, and he walks in, and he's got a Superman crest tattoo on the inside of his forearm. [laughs] And it's like, oh-kay, well you just came in through the Superman entrance, let me show you my letter from Joe Schuster's Sister to Dave Sim on the one side and the picture that I drew of Joe Schuster from The Schuster Awards, and here's my two-page letter from Jerry Siegel when we worked on Ricky Robot on the other side. And he's just going like, wow! Wow! Wow! And I said, now don’t you charge me for this time, I'm going to let you read the letters. And it's like, no no no, wow, wow! So we took a picture, but even before that when I was phoning the plumber to say this is what I want to have done, and the person that I was supposed to talk to, the person who sets it all up. Name's Holly. Okay, talked to Holly, and it's, ”Uh hi Holly, I'd like to get some plumbing done. And this is the thing I want done, this is the thing I want done” and she went, “Okay that sounds like pretty basic stuff. You want this thing, you want that thing, cut through all of that.” She goes, “Have you ever used our plumbing service before?” I said, “Yes I have.” She said, “Okay! I'll check for your information on our database. What's your name?” “ Dave Sim, S-I-M”, and she goes, “Oh my God! Evad! It's Evad!” [laughs] And I'm going, “Evad? There's not a lot of places that I was Evad the anti-Dave. The only one that I can think of is Peter's Place” and she goes, “It's Holly! Holly Wood!” Her name is literally Holly Wood. And I'm going, she was part of the crowd at Peter's Place. She hung around with Val, who is in France now, has been in France for a while, and Helen, who married Dino, you know Dino from “Melmoth”, and they were for me, Helen, and Holly, and Val. Oh my!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Helen and Holly and Val, oh my! So I autographed three copies of “Flailing at Love”, and indicated I didn't write this one, David Birdsong wrote this one, I just tweaked it, and I personalized it on the front, each one of them, “To Helen and Holly and Val, oh my!” Helen and Holly and Val, oh my! And made the lettering bigger on each one. I said, you decide who gets which one. [laughs] So that was one of those, okay, just going that was weird enough and in walks the guy with the Superman tattoo. And he was just absolutely bubbling, didn't have the connection for the shower head that he needed, so he went over to a local supply place to pick one of those up, and he just had to babble at the guy behind the counter that its this cartoonist and his name's Dave Sim, and he goes, “Dave Sim?!” You went to the Off-White House?!” [laughs] It's like, wait a minute! I'm completely unknown in Kitchener. Can we get back to completely unknown in Kitchener? Anyway, on that note, we will leave off because I I'm almost late for my prayer time.
Matt: Okay!
Dave: Have a good night, Matt!
Matt: You too, Dave! We'll do this again next month.
Dave: I hope so! Take care. Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye.
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The Help Out Bill Messner-Loebs Go Fund Me, or buy Rodney Schroeter's book with proceeds going to Bill. OR(!) you could buy Bill's book with the Dave backcover. I have discovered links:
Wanderland (Paperback but slightly more expensive...I dunno why...)
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
And if you wanna see how the book looks in Real Time...
Over on the Facebookees, Mike Jones shared that Dave has a five SEVEN page Strange Death of Alex Raymond story in YEET Presents #68. Mike Jones still has 30 copies of the second printing available, ya gotta back them on Patreon to get it.
And I got my copy of #69, and it has a Journey story in it.
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Our very own Jen DiGiacomo is part of a film production titled The Day Elvis Died. She'll never ask anybody here, but they're crowdfunding to finish the post production on the movie. (It's set in 1977, will a certain obscure Canadian cartoon aardvark make a cameo? (No. Elvis died in August. Cerebus wasn't published until December. Any appearance in the flick would be an anachronism that would ruin the movie for everybody. EVERYBODY!).) Here's the first trailer.
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Up to 35% off December 15-18th*
*Sale dates are not final and therefore subject to change.
And I've been instructed to say:
Make sure to remind your customers to place their orders by the shipping cutoff dates to ensure their goodies from your shop arrive before Christmas! (*Note: These dates apply to all regions.)
- Standard Shipping: December 14th
- Ground: December 16th
I don't think any of you care, but as the TeeGods command...
Speaking of Merch, if you want a strange near-antique, shoot an email to momentofcerebus@gamil.com, and I'll tell ya where to send the $20USD I want for these. No shipping charge in the States or Canada. Everybody else add $10USD for shipping. I'll send 'em anywhere the postman is willing to go...
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| Back and front. |
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You can get all 16 volumes of Cerebus, many of them Remastered for $99CANADIAN at CerebusDownloads.com (More if you want the Remastered Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing...)
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Heritage has:
- A pre-Cerebus illustration by Dave.
- A slabbed copy of #1.
And ComicLink (remember ComicLink? Seiler brought us ComicLink. R.I.P Jeff.) has:
Thanks to Steve for sending the links. He also sent in:
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Oliver' Simonsen's Cerebus movie: The Absurd, Surreal, Metaphysical, and Fractured Destiny of Cerebus the Aardvark it's currently available on "Plex", "Xumo", "Vimeo On Demand", "Tubi". If you're in Brazil..., "Mometu", "Nuclear Home Video".
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And our friends in The Great White North are back:
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Next Time: Mondays!
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