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: Hello, Matt. How’re you doing?
Matt: Great! So, here's how I need to start. Ahem. [sings terribly] Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind! Should old acquaintance be forgot and the days of Auld Lang Syne. [laughs] Because I thought we were never gonna do this again!
Dave: [applauds] I wanna thank everybody for coming out. It’s been a great night, and I hope we’ll see you next time.
Matt: [laughs] Oh, we shouldn't do that again.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: We did that years ago.
Dave: That's right. That's great. Okay, um, let's see. We're, let me switch to page one here… oh here's the strip. I like the strip this time. You're getting better. Do you think that Iguana and Beer, if they ever got the right shaped word balloons they’d have the wrong voices?
Matt: Yeah. It's one of those, there's ways of doing word balloons using the computer, but to do it is more steps than I feel is necessary for my stupid strips.
Dave: [laughs] It's pearls before swine, or age before beauty, or something like that.
Matt: It's Matt's kind of lazy.
Dave: Oh, that too. Let's not rule that one out. “Okay, I believe it is my go to memorialize Jeff.” Uh, yes it is. “But my memory will probably lead to a memory from you.” Well, let's see if that's what happens.
Matt: So I actually looked up in my email, because I'm pretty sure there was an email about this, and there is! So from, let's see, April 2nd, 2007, I emailed the Yahoo Group, and the title was, “I Wonder What Dave Would say?” “So, in my comic for this year's S.P.A.C.E., ‘Racecar Comics’ #3, I have a scene where Angry Jesus shows up and starts pummeling the living crap out of Octo Jesus with his baseball bat of righteousness. It probably doesn't make any more sense if you actually read it. And while this is happening off-panel, I decided to letter real badass wrath of God quotes from The Bible in the background, an easy way to fill up space and not have to draw backgrounds. In the first page, I took some mean stuff from Ezekiel, and then I wanted something that Jesus actually said for the next page, so I randomly flipped to a really red page in Luke. In my Bible, all that Jesus says is red. And by a strange coincidence it was Luke chapter 17. Seiler and Billy are laughing right now. So for all you ‘Tangent’ fans out there look closely on page 10 panel 5 for Luke 17:35, or ‘two women shall be grinding together, the one shall be taken and the other left.’ And I swear I picked it at random! Matt. And yes, I know it's three weeks to S.P.A.C.E. and no, I'm not done with my comic yet. I work better under deadline.” To which Jeff responded, “So (he asked innocently) what do you think that,” emphasis, “means?” [laughs] And I responded, “The two women grinding thing, or the work better under deadline thing? Matt. I once made a sculpture of Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes for an art class. That meant something.”
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: So, and then in a really weird comic art metaphysics thing, I went and grabbed my copy of issue three because I'm gonna scan the relevant panels to put into the videos for this, and the copy I have in my personal stash of “these are my personal copies” has an extra signature in it because it's, you know, the way I do it is, it's just six pages of regular 8 and a half by 11 paper folded in half and stapled, and this is a seventh page which coincidentally is the middle of the book which is the pages I need to scan. So I ripped it out and I'm going, well, this is weirder than it needed to be!
Dave: It is! It is.
Matt: But yeah, it was, 16 years ago I randomly opened the Bible looking for a lot of red, because the red is the words of Christ, and and got “two women grinding” and went, well, that's funny, and so I put it in the strip. And then of course, I told Jeff, and because for those who don't know, way back 16 to 17 years ago, there was a very long very protracted “discussion” between Dave and Jeff Seiler and Billy Beach about “Tangent” and the “two women grinding” passage. And it was, one of these, Jeff and Billy, didn't know the the other one was sending letters to Dave about this, and Dave's just getting deluged with people telling him, “No no, Dave you're wrong, and here's why you're wrong, and here's why. Here's the correct interpretation” and finally you had to send a letter to both of them going, “Guys, knock it off.”
Dave: Right. And then the actual end on that story was when Billy Beach got back to me long after that discussion and went, “Actually, it turned out that you were right. One of the definition of ‘grinding’ is the physical process of grinding.’ He was maintaining, “No, it's the actual Greek term” and whatever it was it only applies to grinding flour or grinding, uhh…
Matt: Wheat.
Dave: Wheat, or whatever it is that you would be grinding. “You're expanding the definition into something it just doesn’t encompass”. And I had to give him major marks for the fact that, having made a big issue out of this, and Jeff Seiler making a big issue out of this, and me going, um, sorry, the the way that it adds up, the fact that that verse is left out of a number of early translations of Mark, and the fact that when it was put in another verse was added in, whoever did that went, “Uh no, this doesn't read the way we want to read. So we're gonna have to either leave it out or if we put it in we have to add another verse.” And it's like, that's when Judaic part of me is going, “You can't do that to scripture! You can't leave things out or put things in just for the sake of the convenience of what you want it to say. Oy vey, you Christians, you make me pull my hair out, and I haven’t gotten much hair left to begin with.” So yeah, okay, good story. I didn't know that it had that comic art metaphyics thing. Obviously, you got swept up into it of, “Uh this will turn up later on, and this’ll…”
Matt: Well, as you said, it was a big deal to Billy, and it was a big deal to Jeff. How big of a deal was it to Jeff? It was such a big deal that after one of your letters arrived, he wrote a 25-page handwritten letter that he mailed off to you, and you got it and went, “No, Jeff, I'm not going to read 25 handwritten pages telling me that I'm wrong. No, we're not doing it.” And like, he brought it to S.P.A.C.E. with him, and was asking us all the Yahoos, “Do you want to read this?” and we're all looking like, no, Jeff. No one wants to read your 25 page screed about anything!
Dave: [laughs] Well, I don't think that that's true. He's become a Please Hold for Dave Sim legend.
Matt: True, but I mean…
Dave: If we keep doing this, there's, I don't know how many of them there are, but there are at least a half dozen 25 page letters from Jeff in the Cerebus Archive, or there should be. Things disappear in a weird way around here, in a very random sense. But someday, Jeff Seiler will have his moment in the sun, and people will be going, “Okay, I would like you to proofread this. Here's Jeff's original handwritten copy, and I've circled the words that I'm not certain that I've transcribed correctly, and the Jeff Seiler Memorial Society will be flourishing, and Dave Sim and Matt Dow will be completely forgotten by then.
Matt: You know, there's a part of me that really hopes that happens.
Dave: [laughs] It would make things a lot less complicated. Okay, a couple of shout outs for me before we get rolling here. But one of them is, congratulations to David Birdsong's daughter Brittany, who got engaged and officially eloped January 2nd, and this ties in later on with, I'm not a father but I am deeply empathetic and sympathetic toward fathers, but I know that there there must have been a big part of Birdsong that was going, “Brittany has been in the U.S military for,” I forget how many years she's been in the military. “If she can't find one good man in the entire U.S military in that time, I just give up.” So congratulations to you, Birdsong is uncharacteristically optimistic as a result of Brittany getting married over the holidays, and also the fact that he got a lot of sleep on vacation. The only bad news is the new son-in-law Justin, a Navy aviation mechanic, will be in Okinawa Japan for around six months starting sometime this spring, with any luck he'll only see Taiwan sing and not get dragged down along with it. See how fast the case of optimism can be cured? I got a lot more confidence in the US Military than that. I don’t think Xi Jinping would dare to take a step towards Taiwan. You can overfly somebody's airspace, but I think he's got a pretty good idea that he’d be biting off more than he could chew with Taiwan. My other shout out is remembering Anita Pointer, who just died last Saturday. And it was one of those, people ask me all the time, “What music do you like, or what music do you listen to when you're drawing?” And it's like, I don't listen to music. I keep the Off-White House and the studio completely silent while I'm working. But I do have a history of music, so it was one of those situations where I went, oh, one of the Pointer Sisters died, Anita died, and it's like well that only leaves one of them now. It's Anita, Ruth, Bonnie, and June Pointer. Born the daughters of a minister, grew up singing in their father's Church in Oakland California. And the effect that happens is I go, what was the Pointer Sister song that John Brent, who was uh the DJ at Peter's Place and then the DJ at Stages, and then much later on at the Flying Dog, and I must have seen him DJ at two or three other places, and it's like, oh the Pointer Sisters! It was a tune that John played that was a live version, I didn't have the live version, the only version that I had was on the “Beverly Hills Cop” soundtrack. And it's like, you know, Anita dies at 74. How did Anita Pointer get to be 74? It's like, Grandpa, “Beverly Hills Cop” was like 40 years ago now. And it's like, oooh. Oooh. Anyway, so John would play this tune and it was one of his real barn burners. This is the one that he would save for [sneezes] midnight, 12:30, 1 o'clock in the morning, and Stages was a real high tech discotheque with the laser lights, and spotlights, and laser effects, and dry ice, and the whole thing. Three rocking levels, used to be a movie theatre. Used to be the Odeon. And it's like, he would sample a couple of musical passages out of the song in question, and then you would know, okay, it's coming up ahead. And the he’d go back to a Prince or We Pledge Allegiance to the Time or whatever it was. Or, we don’t need no water, let the mother F-er burn. Burn mother F-er, burn. Which is everybody singing along to that. And I'm going, uh I can't remember what the song was. So it was like I'm going, okay what were their hits, while I'm reading the obituary. “Known for their hit songs, including, ‘I'm So Excited.’” And I went, that was the one! [laughs] At that point, Grandpa, who lives in complete silence, stays focused on his art, and not be distracted from anything, just scripture and just having scripture on his iTunes. Suddenly has this world-class sound system in his brain playing “I'm So Excited” at about 11. So, people wanting to know, okay what was the last couple of days? The obituary was in the Toronto Star Monday January 2nd. What was Grandpa's Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday like this week? See if you can find a really really hardcore “I'm So Excited” Pointer Sisters live performance on YouTube, and link to it, [laughs] and if you want to see a barn burner of a last song for a concert, I think probably the only one that even competes with that is the Rolling Stones “Brown Sugar.” So that's my shout out on that one. The Pointer Sisters also come up a little later on in the proceedings.
And then, inquiring minds want to know. Kyle Pinion asks, “Is the Remastered ‘Last Day’ still set to come out this month?” Uh, no. “I might hold off for the hardcover, but this is one blasted spot on my bookshelf needs filling somehow!” And Matt notes, “I haven't had a chance to post the four page fax to Dagon about the hardcover Kickstarter yet.” And, have you done that at this point? Not yet. I'll probably either put it up tomorrow or else I might just throw it in the videos for this on Saturday.
Dave: It’s kind of a downer. [laughs] Wouldn't you agree?
Matt: It's one of those, that came in ,I'm like, well this is a downer but yeah okay I'll get it up, and then, as we get to later, Tuesday happened, and it's like, well, I can't put this up on Tuesday because Tuesday is something else.
Dave: Right. Right. Yeah, it's one of those, we tried soliciting “The Last Day” through Diamond, and then Dagon will jump on and get ready to do the hardcover. So we'll piggyback the two together, the softcover and the hardcover, and let's see if this all comes out in the wash the way it's supposed to. And now the cancel date for the purchase order is the end of January. Dagon is just asking, “Should I do the Kickstarter?” And it's like, ehh, no, it's okay this didn't work. So we don't really have a plan B. Giving you a spoiler warning, the best that we can kind of hope for is next time we try and do this, Aardvark-Vanaheim’s just gonna take a thousand softcovers, Dagon will take a thousand hardcovers or 500 hardcovers or however many he's gonna to take, and then we'll do the solicitation after that they're printed. And do the Kickstarter after that they're printed. And we'll see how that works out. It'll be a lot of upfront money and guesswork on both of our parts, but at least hopefully we won't have the months-long delay on on the fulfillment, which is the thing that I'm getting the most concerned about, and I know Dagon is getting the most concerned about. So, Kyle, there's the answer right there. The way we tried to do it this time didn't work, so scrub the launch, we'll try and plan something else and hope that that goes a little better. I've now got a plan C in case the “I print a thousand, Dagon prints a thousand or prints 500” doesn't pan out, that might involve just doing one single hardcover at a time. [laughs] You wanna order one of these? Fine, you let us know and this is what it's going to cost, because we're going to print them one at a time, which would be the extreme other end from getting them done through Marquis.
Matt: Okay. It's a bummer, but at the same time as you say in the fax and spoiling the fax, you're not a hardcover guy, you really don't care.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, I mean there’s a part of me that’s going, if I was a hardcover guy, it would be, oh this is so disappointing. But not being a hardcover guy, I have to keep warning everybody uh if something goes wrong with the hardcovers, the one guy who is absolutely not going to be heartbroken about it is Dave Sim.
Matt: I ordered two copies of the softcover of the Waverly edition of “Form & Void” because somebody was going to miss out, and it was, “Hey, you know, I don't have the funds right now but I will in the future.” I'm like okay, I'll order two copies, and Travis can just pay me when he gets the money. And when the box arrived, I opened it up, and it's one softcover, one hardcover, and I'm like, well I’m not really a hardcover guy, but this does look really neat now that it's in my hand!
Dave: Uh-huh.
Matt: So I'm gonna keep the hardcover, I'm selling the softcover as soon as I get an email back saying, “Oh, well, okay, you know, let me give you your money” and if I don't hear from the guy, then I don't know what I'm gonna do with the other one.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: That might be somebody going, “I really need a hardcover” and I’m like, well, I guess I'll keep the softcover and make my money back.
Dave: Right. See, the contrast for me was, I got the hardcover in, just sent me one copy and I've got number one out of however many he printed of them. And it's like, mhmm, flipped through it, turned it over to the back, looked at the spine, looked at the inset drawing, cloth binding, and it's like, it's a hardcover. I'm just not a hardcover guy. I think a lot of people relying on, “Well once he sees the puppy, he'll change his mind about puppies in a hurry.” It's like, mhmm, no, I'm just not a puppy guy. Nothing against people who love puppies, but Grandpa is not a puppy guy.
Matt: Well that's, I'm not a dog guy, and the kids keep going, Natasha especially, is, “I'm gonna get a dog when I grow up”. I'm like, that's great, as soon as you move out of my house, you can have as many dogs as you want. I'm not living with a dog! So the kids know that I'm not a dog guy, but we'll be out and I'll see a dog and oh I love dogs! And they're like, “You don't like dogs.” I love dogs. My favorite part is when they go away with their owner and I don't have to deal with them anymore.
Dave: [laughs] I'm on the same page with you on that one.
Matt: Well yeah, the other one is, every time I see a dog I'm like, oh look at the puppy, and people will be like, “Oh no, this is a very old dog.” I'm like, every dog's a puppy to me, and the dogs perk up like, “Oh I'm a puppy? Yeah, I'm cute!” and then they go away and back to their old age dog life. I don't care!
Dave: Right. Right. Okay, moving on to Travis axed, “Hi Matt, was just reading a comic from 1986 and thought the artist may have been going for a Dave Sim as Barbarian look to the character. Thought you may enjoy it.” And I didn't read the page three, the splash page, but what did you think? You think he's got a case to be made for this, or is he is he really stretching a point?
Matt: I couldn't find what I was looking for, but I remember there was, one of your early self-portraits was in I think a “Cerebus Archive” issue, and when I saw the images that he sent I went, yeah, I can see young Dave Sim. And then I'm thinking, but I'm like as I look at the cover, I'm going, well. It's one of those, the art style is just abstract enough that you could project, I mean, you could easily say it's a young John Travolta too.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, all of us folks from the 70s and 80s all look alike. That's not racist and that’s not discrimination, we all did look alike.
Matt: Well, I mean, it does have a Dave Sim quality to it, but then again, the art style is such that you know, what detail is there is just first sparse enough that you can, you know. It's kind of a rorschach test of, if you have Dave Sim on the mind, yeah, that looks like Dave. My thing is, as I was looking at them, I’m like, the name Brad Moore, who's the artist sounds familiar. I'm like, is this somebody who did something else and had stuff in the back of “Cerebus” and like a “Unique Story” or some self-published thing that got plugged. And so then I'm thinking, well, is this going to be one of these “Dave has this book?”
Dave: Right. As you say, Brad Moore, that's ringing a bell somewhere with me as well. I'm not sure where the bell is ringing, or why it's ringing, but that's, I haven't even noticed the the name of the artist. The shot of the three girls, “Would-be-heroes are thick as flies and you were among the easy ones.” And it's like, ehh, yeah, definitely in 1986 I was a barbarian, but I didn't think that I was a barbarian. I thought I was as civilized as you could possibly be, and a lot of that had to do with being, as they say, just a little too easy. Like there were people that would try and call my attention to it. And it was like, I remember Colleen Doran saying to me one time at a party or something, where it was just two of us talking, and she had her, “Somebody really needs to talk to you about this” voice on. And it was, “You realize that these girls are bragging about sleeping with you, and you're not bragging about sleeping with them?” And it's like, uhh, I suppose so. What's your point? [laughs] It's like, “Well, that is the point! Don't you understand that that's not a good thing?” And it's like, well, no, it's that sounds like it pays to advertise and it's like, “Well, that's barbaric. Can't you understand that that's barbaric?” So it was the same kind of thing as when I would try to talk to Chester about prostitution. “Somebody needs to talk to you about this, and okay, I'm going to give it a try. You do know that this is wrong?” “Well no, what's wrong about it?” “Well, it's prostitution! What don't you not get about prostitution being bad? What do you not get about being a completely standardless skirt-chaser is not a good thing? And we know that it's not a good thing because most people aren't that, and most people aren't that because they know that it's not a good thing. And Colleen made absolutely no more impression on me than I did on Chester Brown in the conversation. So, but of course now it's, well, now I know the difference. It's fornication and adultery are definitely not on the menu. Not even on the potential menu. It's not “But I haven't found the right person to fornicate with.” I just don't do that. The same as I don't hire prostitutes. But that took a long time to get to that point, I must say. Okay, moving on-- go ahead.
Matt: And you had a lot of fun getting there! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Well, yes, but there’s a… uhh…
Matt: It's great to have a wonderful birthday with lots of prizes and pinatas and bounce houses and stuff, until the end of the party when it's time to clean this mess up.
Dave: Right. Right. I mean, it's the same as, it's a funny line, but like Woody Allen's “Say what you will about bisexuality, it definitely doubles your odds of getting a date for Saturday night.” [laughs] And it’s like, well yes, but don't you see how that, it's funny because it is disgusting. His other line was, “Empty sex with a stranger is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it's one of the better ones.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay! Moving onto Larry Wooten, “Greetings!” and thank you, Larry, for the Off-White House stickers again, especially for overdoing it on the Off-White House stickers. Rolly and I are finding more and more uses for those day after day after day, and never would have thought about getting them for myself or getting them for Aardvark-Vanaheim, and everybody just thinks they're the coolest thing and me foremost among them, and I have Larry Wooten to thank for that. Sandeep Atwell for coming up with the design that Larry Wooten ended up using, but Larry Wooten for the execution on that one. “I have two pieces that I picked up secondhand and was curious if Dave remembered anything about them. Curious if the Space Beaver was done as a gift during a convention while sitting next to each other and chatting or something like that.” Well first of, let's talk about the Dave Sim/Gerhard piece. That's very very early in the collaboration, 1984. So it's the first time that we collaborated was “The First Fifth” that was printed an “Epic Magazine.” This would have been one of the ones where, wasn't quite ready to do another colour story because a story does take up time, it's, okay, we'll try and shoehorn that in somewhere because Epic is a good place to be seen. But let's work on Gerhard actually fitting into the monthly comic book and get a comfort level there before we start really ramping up the production. But we did do a few of these. I remember going to signings, the first few signings that Gerhard and I went in went to, and going, all right, let's see how this does. So we would bring the art materials, and I would sit down and do a Cerebus of some kind, leaving room for a background, and Gerhard would be signing stuff, and answering people's questions. And I would be sort of just kibbitzing on the conversation and then it would go the other way. Once I had finished pencil and inking the Cerebus then that went to Gerhard and I would be answering the questions and signing the comic books, while Gerard put the background in and watercoloured it with the Dr Martin dyes, and then we'd hold it up and auction it. You know, what am I bid for this? And of course, the people who were looking to get artwork and would like a nice piece of artwork would be hanging around to see what the next one would look like. And that went pretty good, and they went for much better prices than I was getting just for a a black and white sketch, because it's a watercolour piece. It's fully inked and it's in colour, and that's something that art fans are very very fond of. So it looks to me like that was one of the earlier examples of doing that. There were a few examples of it that Archie Goodwin ran as a portfolio in “Epic Magazine”, so it was something that we did for a time, and then it was, they go for more money, black and white is faster to do, so we're probably better off just sticking with the black and white because we can get more black and white ones done in the space of time that it takes to do one of these colour ones. You have a mental taxi meter of how long it's taking you to do this, and how much you're going to need to charge to validate how much time you're putting in on this, and this was a brand new taxi meter. So it was, well okay, let's do this and then it's, mhmm, I think we're going to get more dollars per mile for a black and white foreground and black and white background just in people's sketchbooks and stuff like that. But we'd go back and forth on that. So I would say that that's the noteworthy aspect is this is definitely very early in the collaboration, and this is, the collaboration started with me doing black and white, Gerhard doing black and white backgrounds, and then watercolouring the whole thing. So it's something we did for a period of time and then revisited, like we did the the big Samurai piece for Mid-Ohio Con um as as a benefit and that was one of those, okay, if we're gonna do this, let's do one really really good one instead of trying to do however many we can do, like four or five in a day, and auctioning those off, and do they go for enough money to to validate it? It's like the full-sized Samurai piece that's on the back cover of one of the “Cerebus” issues, it's a good size. It's definitely, Samurai stuff is hot. It's got a dragon on it that Gerhard did, it's watercoloured and Gerhard actually framed it at the convention. And it went for, I think, like $600? Which [laughs] was a lot of money at that time. It was, that's a good contribution to the March of Dimes charity, and it's a good price for a Dave Sim/Gerhard collaboration. That would be a major steal at at this point, but that's the difference that the 30 years will make.
Matt: Right. I mean, was that piece also in the Epic portfolio? I know there's a Cerebus as a Samurai in the Epic portfolio, but I don't know if it's that particular piece.
Dave: No. No. This was one that was only on the back cover. And I think it was an art dealer in Ohio,h who I won't name, who bought it. And it's, as far as I know, it's still in his collection. Once an art dealer gets something in his collection and decides to hang on to it, if he's any kind of a competent art dealer, and this guy is a very competent art dealer,it's you'll have to pry it out of his cold dead hands. So, and because it was done at the show, there was no way that we were going to get it photographed, so that we could do a poster or a print out of it, which would have been a really good idea. It would be much easier to do now, then we'd have to send it to a colour separator overnight or something to get the separations done. So if copies are ever done of that, it'll be way way way up ahead.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: It was a really nice piece. It was a really nice piece. I was very very happy with the way it came out, and Gerhard was very happy with the way that it came out. And I am still using the “Cerebus hates this PR crap”, I think this was somebody bringing up a copy of his comic book? That would happen, and saying, “Can I get a picture of Cerebus with my character?” and I was always happy to do it. It's a great challenge as a cartoonist to see somebody's character for the first time, and here it is. They gave me this comic book, and I can look through it and go okay, what is he trying to do here? And what's my version of doing that? I still enjoy doing that. I still enjoy having a crack at somebody else's character. [laughs] But always struck me as this really wouldn't be Cerebus’ kind of thing. “Why are you sticking Cerebus with somebody else's character again? Leave Cerebus alone!” So I always I always tend to put that word baloon or thought balloon in, “Cerebus hates this PR crap.” It looks about… 1984? 85? So… no it doesn't ring a bell in terms of, do I remember sitting next to this guy? I can't rule that out that I was sitting next to the guy, but I think it was a situation where he said, “I would like a sketch of Cerebus with my character. What would you charge for that?” And by that point, it was, “You tell me how much you want to spend and that's how good the picture is going to be.” So this looks to be about probably a $25, $30 sketch from the time period. And it was still at the time when you could pretty much read my signature, which is definitely not true anymore.
Okay! And that's page eight, onto page nine. “Helen and Alex Raymond's 1934 Christmas card.” Yes, when it was, Alex Raymond's vision of who he and Helen were. And definitely that they were both very very good Catholics, and they were both in this together. Dale Arden dressed as Flash Gordon, which is, mhmm, wouldn't want to go there, either at the time or currently, but obviously it was something that Alex Raymond thought had a certain charm to it. And it's a gorgeous piece . What a difference 14 or 15 years makes in terms of, “No, remember ‘till death us do part, and for richer or poorer, in good health and bad’ etc etc etc, and when you actually meant that at the upper level of your thinking. You think you've gotten more sophisticated, but you just lost sight of of your priorities.” I hate to say, but I think in Alex Raymond's case, that would be the case.
47:03
“Oliver Simonsen found a post from one Loren Gray.” Oh, I read this one! Yeah. “So yeah I was digging through some comics at a flea market”, can you stand it? At a flea market! “I saw a corner of this sticking out of a stack of magazines next to it. Asked the lady whose booth it was, ‘you know what this is, right?’ She said, ‘yeah, but it's yellowed.’” Can you stand it?! “Sold it to me for a ridiculous, I mean, ridiculously low amount. She obviously did not know it was original art from ‘Cerebus’ #2, his second appearance, and it's a beautiful page at that. Not just some filler panels. Mind still blown!” Matt says, “It was page 20, and I hate Loren.” [laughs] It's, uh, yeah , at least he was nice enough not to tell us what the ridiculously low price was.
Matt: Well Oliver shared it to the Cerebus Facebook group, and I commented, “Congratulations” and a gif of Andrew Garfield saying, “I literally hate you right now.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: It's one of those, you know, you hear these stories and you're like, oh that's made up. That didn't happen. No, no, sometimes you go to the flea market and you find the holy grail and you manage to walk it back to your car. And I'm sure Loren's probably spent the next two days just staring at the page going, “I didn't really buy this for cheap. Cause this is one of those Cerebus Archive portfolio pages that's a reprint, it's not the original page from 1978!” And yeah, yeah it is. You've got one of them once in a lifetime deals, insure the hell out of it because you're gonna get hit by lightning.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. But I have to admire again his restraints, first of all for not saying what the ridiculously low price was, and then not adding to it, “nyah-nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah!”
Matt: Well speaking of original Dave Simm art, I don't know if it's in the latest Heritage Catalog, but right now they're auctioning off the entire seven page “On the Back of A Pro” story.
Dave: Really?
Matt: I put a bid in, and my low ball amount got blown out of the water. I forget where, I think it's up to like two or three hundred bucks right now. There's another auction that's got five or six pages of Beavers art from the two issues of “Quack!” that had the Beavers. It's not sequential, you know, it's like four or five from one story, and one, three, and six from the other.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Coming up for auction, if it hasn't already started is the original cover art to “Oktoberfest” #1.
Dave: Holy smokes! Okay. [clears throat] Wherever Harry Kremer’s artwork went to, it's now coming home to roost.
Matt: I believe all three of these are from the Darren Shan collection, so Darren must have got a hold of them at some point.
Dave: Yeah, “On the Back of A Pro” is just on sketchbook paper. I couldn't even afford art paper at that time. It was just, well okay, this is, it says art sketch pad, so I will do art in my sketch pad, and it's just for a fanzine and I'm not getting paid for this, so I'm definitely not shelling out for illustration board or anything like that.
Matt: There's this part of me that went, if I thought I could win it, I would go for the “Oktoberfest” #1 cover and then get a good scan of it and pay Gerhard to put a background on it.
Dave: [laughs] What does the actual North Pole look like? And can Gerhard put it in behind Uncle Hans?
Matt: Well it's one of those, ya know, Ger, what kind of background can I get for the pennies that I have? And I know at a certain point it's gonna be, “Well I'll make it blue.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: You know, 10 bucks to get you 10 bucks worth.
Dave: Right. Right. Oh man. Mkay. How about that, the “Oktoberfest” #1 cover still exists. “On the Back of A Pro” still exists! This is what boggles my mind, is most of the time I think to myself, “Uh, that's just it existed at one point, but I didn't get famous enough and famous fast enough for that to be preserved.” And you'd be surprised! You'd be surprised what artwork that wouldn't be an odds on favourite to get saved, actually got saved.
Matt: Well, and the part that I like is they're going through Heritage, so if Kevin gets there and scans them, you'll have copies of it!
Dave: Right! Right. Yeah.
Matt: And that's one of those where you think, well you know, it's great there's an original page from issue 27 that's coming through. That'll be good, we can put that in the next version of the printing with the remastering. And that's like, and “On the Back of A Pro” is there! And maybe we'll just not send Dave those files, because he might not wanna look at them! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Oh no no, I can look at just about anything at this point. It's, that's how I learned, so everything has that value to it. There was definitely a bunch of years there where I didn't want to want to see this stuff, and it's probably the most painful to this day is “How's Your Beaver?” I still don't like flipping through that one, if I can possibly help it. I had a stray thought, just speaking about “Oktoberfest Comics” with the Turtles Eight Kickstarter coming up. How many more sleeps have we got till the Turtles Eight Kickstarter?
Matt: Uh, 55, or 54.
Dave: Right. Right. Good.
Matt: That's the other thing I forgot. They also at Heritage are auctioning off, and as I said when I posted about it, “Who's got money? Oh no, you don't.” The original cover painting to Turtles 8.
Dave: Really?!
Matt: Kevin Eastman gave it to Richard Corben as a thank you because Renet was inspired by a Richard Corben girl. And now that Richard Corben has died they're auctioning It off.
Dave: Wow.
Matt: And it's going for like $80,000.
Dave: [laughs] Okay! Well, I have a very happy inner 30 year old Dave Sim going, “No way! That is so cool.” I hope Kevin has the same reaction. That was very nice of him to give it to Richard Corben.
Matt: Well, there's also, I got an email today, there's a Kevin Eastman original painting. It's a cover of a human ninja, so it's a jungle setting, there's a bunch of enemies coming out of the jungle and in the foreground is a human ninja hiding behind a tree, and it's a bare chested guy with a sword, and a turtle's mask. And that also got given to Richard Corben, and I'm just like, I don't know what kind of relationship they had, but it must have been real fun to be Richard Corben getting original Kevin Eastman paintings in the mail, going, “Oh, that's nice!” And then like setting it aside and going back to work.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, it's Richard Corben loomed much larger in Kevin Eastman's life than Kevin Eastman did in Richard Corben's life. But I'm sure he had no idea that, well, if you're concerned about the widow and how she's gonna do when you're not there to provide for her, turns out that the really enthusiastic bushy-tailed kid from New England, that's going to be a major part of that somewhere up ahead, which is another thing that we never quite know.
Okay, I'm gonna have to take a break for my last prayer time, and then we're coming back for Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania and Steve Peters.
Matt: Okay!
Dave: Talk to you in a few minutes.
Matt: Okay! That works! Bye.
[guitar music]
Matt: Hello again, Dave!
Dave: Hello again, Matt!
Okay, we're gonna move on to Michael R of Eastonm Pennsylvania. What would Please Hold be without Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania? And I actually got Rolly to scan the front of the Christmas card that I got from the R family. I'm just going to go over here and grab it. So, this is the front of the Christmas card that I imagine you'll be putting on the screen while we're talking about this. And this was another one of those empathy situations, where I'm not a husband, I'm not a boyfriend, but I definitely have empathy for fathers in their father situation. Michael was in the same situation with, uh well you're looking at them on the screen. There's Michael on the left, and then his wife Grace, and then Lil Grace, their daughter, and Brock, their son-in-law, and that's Brock and Lil Grace's baby,h Michael's Grandchild Zoe. And of course, the Cerebus cutout from “Funny Pages”, the one that wasn't used in “Funny Pages” because that part had to be reshot, but this is what the cutout looked like in the movie. Cerebus Charlie Brownshirt. So definitely the visiting Nazi in the R family, Charlie Brownshirt Cerebus. I thought that was very funny on Owen Klein's part, that he specifically wanted that shot of Cerebus for “Funny Pages”. It's like, believe me, if there's any Cerebus that no one would ever want to have in their comic store, it's Charlie Brownshirt Cerebus. But, same situation, Michael would say from time to time, mentioning that Brock and Lil Grace are still together, but no sign of a wedding yet, and it's like, uhh, it's one of those situations where every father wants his daughters happily and safely married. They don't want them just shacked up with somebody. And the most uncomfortable experience that I had with that, was one of the limo drivers for Emerald Limousine who was a new driver, and I hadn't met him before, and he picked me up and introduced himself and he said, “You know my daughter!” And I went, oh I do? He said yes, and he named her name. And I thought, oh that's one that I just, not in quotation marks, just banged a few times and then that was it. And here's her father driving me someplace, and it's like, uhh, that's really uncomfortable. You don't want to ever be in the situation of being forced to recognise that you did that to another man's pride and joy daughter, despoiling her in effect and that's exactly what I was doing. And it's like, well, okay, you've always done that. Like everyone that you slept with that you had absolutely no intention of marrying, or even living with, or even dating for any length of time, that's what you were doing to another man's daughter. Don't do stuff like that!
So, getting to Michael's question, “Hi Dave happy New Year!” Happy New Year, Michael! “I just started rereading ‘Guys’ phonebook and said to myself, ‘self, Dave's British accents for Prince Keef, Richard George, Harrison Starkey, plus everyone else's written accents to be dead on perfect.’ Did you act out the characters first by talking to yourself, or did you write out what the character is going to say and then modify the written words to sound like the character you wanted to portray in the scene?” Ah, well, the process there was definitely method acting mentally the character. I would get the voice in my head, and certainly the Mick Jagger voice was always a dominant voice in my head, because it's a great character. I mean Mick Jagger is an actual person, but who Mick Jagger presents as and the Mick Jagger that everybody imagines that they know mentally, which is I'm sure completely different from who Mick Jagger is, is a great character. And I always wanted to write a movie or a television show for Mick Jagger. They did a pretty good job on “Saturday Night Live” writing Mick Jagger when he was on… Dan Aykroyd doing Tom Snyder's program, doing his Tom Snyder impression. But it wasn't really the Mick Jagger character. It was a little too trying not to lean too far into who Mick Jagger was. So, it was a matter of, okay, what would they say and how would they say it? And that got sketched at the same time that I was writing the dialogue. So it was definitely an interaction between, okay here's… well we'll simplify it just down to Mick and Keef with the “Church & State” Volume 2 sequence, and okay, how do they interact? And what is it that they're going to say to each other? And then having said this, what do they look like, and how close do we have to be looking at them to really convey the humour of the iconic character? Again, Mick Jagger is whoever he actually is, is Mick Jagger only when he's around himself and people that he actually knows, family and friends. Keith Richards is Keith Richards, which is completely different from, again, the iconic Keith Richards. I think that's got to be one of the toughest things about being in a relationship with somebody who is that famous, where “This isn't the person that I know that everybody else feels like they they own a part of that person.” And because I was doing comics, I would never actually act out the character, because there wasn't going to be sound on the page. It's just written. So it had to be written as accurately as possible, and then the dialogue had to interact with the character on the page and the panel to panel progression had to be developed simultaneously. So when, you go on to say, “Boy, I would have liked to be in the room watching Gerhard listen to you trying to capture the accent by speaking the voices then jotting the words down with the ‘correct’ spelling. Lol.” You'd have to ask Gerhard, but I'm pretty sure I never really did that. If I was doing the voices in front of him, then I wouldn't be getting the reaction from him that I would get when he actually read the pages, because he'd be reacting as much to whatever it is that I had been acting out in the studio as he would to what's on the page. And it's like, well we're not selling me acting out in the studio, we're selling what's on the page. Which ties in with the thing of the studio being absolutely silent while I'm working. People are going to fill the silence with whatever they want to fill the silence with, but in terms of my participation in their reading experience, it's going to be completely silent. It's all on the page. And having said that, I appreciate the compliment, “The written accent is to me dead on perfect.” [laughs] You have to realise, that it may be dead on perfect to you as an American, and it may be dead on perfect to me as a Canadian, but for a lot of Brits, this just makes their flesh crawl. It's like, “Don't do that! I mean you really don't know what you're doing, and you really don't know what you're doing in a major way, so just it's like fingernails on the chalkboard.” The example that is always cited is Dick Van Dyke in “Mary Poppins”, doing Bert, I think the character was, with the Cockney accent. [laughs] And it's like that destroyed American/British relations for decades, because they would play “Mary Poppins” every either Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve on the BBC, and it would just make everybody's molars grind. Dick Van Dyke's Bert is an extreme example of that, because, first of all “Mary Poppins” was made by Disney. It was an American Studio, and it was, Dick Van Dyke was coming off of the run of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” which was the most successful TV show at the time. And consequently nobody was really in the situation, having signed him up to play Bert, “Your Cockney accent is really bad. Can we get you a coach that can tell you…?” Even if you start thinking about this too thoroughly you go, Julie Andrews’ molars must have been grinding, but she's Julie Andrews, he's Dick Van Dyke, never the twain shall meet. It's not her place to say to a big star like Dick Van Dyke, “Your Cockney accent is terrible. He really does need a voice coach.” The lead female in a major production like that doesn't say that to the lead male. It would be up to the producers or the director or whoever it is, or Walt Disney to say, “Something has to be done about that accent.” It'd be interesting, I hope that some of our British listeners will be listening to this, and will let you know exactly how bad the accents are. And just rubbing it in, [laughs] I've pulled out “Church & State” Volume Two, because I am still proud of the dialogue. I am still proud of the phonetic transcription, which is reasonably accurate, I think. And so here we are, starting on on page 695, the splash page of “Flying Off the Handle At Oblique Angles”. [does all the voices] “I was wondering if he was coming back or not. Who is your friend?“ “Don’t try and humour me, I’ve gone dotty.” “How do you mean?” “Seeing things. Giant bugs!” “I say, I tried to tell him, son. But he thinks I'm a figment of his imagination.” “With a talking head where his belly ought to be.” “Audio visual, that is. So are you boys in town for the Secret Sacred Wars” “Secret Sacred Wars? What’s that?” “What, I say, what are the Secret Sacred Wars? Why it's the culmination, son! The nexus point. The hole in the donut. The event of the millennium. The greatest story ever told, son! And you, I say, you are there!” “Cor. Sounds like a bit of a bash. You want to go? “Here! Where did you find that, then?” “Behind the headrest tucked up under the fake trim. Same place you always hide it.” “Keef, put it down! That's supposed to last until breakfast tomorrow!” “If I'm going to a bash, I'm not bleeding going straight, am I?” “Wait!” [snorts] “Cor blimey, Keef, you haven’t straight since 1409!” “Oh. Yeah. I forgot.”
So there you go. I enjoyed doing that, I enjoyed writing it, I enjoyed drawing it, but definitely that's one of those, there are much better voices for somebody to have in their head as a dominant note than Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and I speak from experience on that. Which is one of those, they really took it far far to an extreme extent. I mean, how do you atone for “Their Satanic Majesties Request” and “Sympathy for the Devil”. It was an attempt on, I think, Keith's part on “Voodoo Lounge” to do “Blinded By Rainbows”, but mhmm, you were way too far over in the discussion and you never really made your way all the way back, and everybody has what everybody has that they're going to bring before God on Judgment Day. And what choices Mick Jagger made, and what choices Keith Richards made, I wouldn't want to be bringing that before God on Judgment Day. Just speaking personally.
Matt: Well, the classic is, Keith did his autobiography and supposedly when his Dad died he took some of his Dad's ashes and mixed it with some cocaine and did a line of coke. And you know, it's in the book and everybody's like, “That's so shocking” and when he's getting interviewed, he's like, “It was a joke! Obviously I didn't do that.” And everybody's going, “No, Keith, we know you did.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: He said, “Oh no, it was a joke. I didn't actually do that. Nobody would do that!” It's like, “Yeah, Keith, we think you did that.”
Dave: Yes. Yes, and what does what does that tell you? If you've gone that far over, there's no coming back from that. So, yes, anything that you make a joke about you're gonna have trouble convincing people that no you're not that bad. It's like, well okay, but if there's anybody in a category that we would think of being that bad, if Keith Richard isn’t at the top of the list, he’s definitely near the top of the list. So there's the answer on that one, Michael R. And thank you for the Christmas card. I will treasure it, it's just like being part of the family. The Charlie Brownshirt Cerebus Nazi that I have inside of me in the bosom of your family.
Matt: [laughs] That's pretty good.
Dave: [laughs] That's what I'm seeing when I'm looking at it.
And the last one is going to be Steve Peters. Very nice of you to forward that one and say okay, anybody else gets bumped to February. But we do make special allowances for Steve Peters, because he's, first of all, he's a creative genius. I think we can both agree on that.
Matt: Yeah. I actually, his last Kickstarter, he was running out of gas and the Kickstarter might not make it, so he released a couple, he's got some blank sketch covers, and I bid on one in the past, and I still haven't gotten it because COVID happened and all sort of stuff. And it's fine, like I'm not in any rush for Steve to rush this to me. Take your time Steve. But he released more of them, and I bought a second one, and he sent me a message going, “Oh yeah, what cover do you want?” and I haven't responded because I'm just thinking what cover do I want him to do with his characters ? And so it's like every time I get a message from Steve about anything, I just feel guilty like, oh yeah I gotta get back to Steve, I keep forgetting about Steve. But when Steve shows up it's like this ray of sunshine because you're right, Steve is just great!
Dave: Yes. Yes. And particularly because he is talking about music here, about writing a song, I hope that… I don't know how you would sell it in this day and age, because music circulates a lot more freely even than comics and illustrations do, but man, you know, the fact that that you can do a whole CD, and draw the comics adaptation of it, and it all came from the same guy. That's just mind-boggling. And I'm sure Steve is is more than happy not to hear from you. It's like as long as he doesn't hear from you as to what you want, then he doesn't have to do it.
Matt: Well, I think he wants to hear from me to get it out of the way, because he wants to clear the deck for the next one.
Dave: Right. Right. Well, different kinds of different ways on that. I have to admit that any kind of obligation that I'm committed to, like the video for the Portuguese translation of “Cerebus”, still haven't heard back from Brazil about that one. I don't know if that's because of, that Bolsonaro/ da Silva election was, man, you talk about Red State versus Blue State. 51% to 49%, that's got to be a very very tense country at this point. And is probably affecting everybody's schedule and everybody's state of mind. So, as long as I don't hear from them, I don't have to do the video, and I'm not behind on the video. And I'm not too proud to admit that I'm that way and just about anybody who's doing commission pieces is that way at some level or another. So Steve writes, “Can you expound on the significance of Mungu Mkono? Why you latched onto it initially, I'm assuming it was in Mary Hemingway's diary,” yes it was, “And why it was that the phrase became so significant to Cerebus later that it drove him batty for a while. I'm working on a new song. It was one of those things that just wrote itself, at least the music part of it. I spent some time figuring out what the theme would be, what it would be called, and again it was one of those things where I knew if you wait long enough, it'll come to you. And the answer was Mungu Mkono. So if you can give any thoughts on that, it might help me out with the lyrics.” I'm hoping that you can just sort of put up some images from the whole Mungu Mkono plane crash sequence. And this was one of those, I mean Steve is also a an extremely spiritual guy. In my frames of reference, is probably a little closer to paganism than to monotheism, but definitely intends to be a good monotheist. And I don't know, none of us know how that works. How much does it count that you had good intentions? We know what the road to Hell is paved with. But that's above all of our pay scales. It's God that decides whose intentions were actually good and who was just kidding themselves, I assume. So because this starts going all over the place, or has the potential to go all over the place, and we're coming up on the two-hour mark, so trying to bring this in for a landing, I thought, okay, this is one of those ones where I'm going to type out the answer and that's what I did this afternoon.
So, “Mungu. Mungu Mkono. God. In the hand of God.” It's a fusion, I infer, of primal African theology subsumed within Islam. Like Allahu Akbar, God is greatest. This is the proper reaction of human beings to terrifying enormity, which the Hemingway's plane crash constituted. In the face of terrifying enormity, call God to mind out loud, vehemently, and with deference, humility, and subserience. I would assume someone among the Kenyan natives said it and everyone else followed suit. To the Hemingways that reaction was evidence of simple-mindedness and the inferiority of black Africans to New York City sophisticates like themselves. Superstition. Both of those are perception choices. The first I infer good, and the second I infer bad. It isn't, I infer, God's literal hand, but it is, I infer, the best illustration of the answer to the old canard, “Is God sufficiently omnipotent to create a rock big enough that even he can't lift it?” Theoretically, as in, I would theorise, that's what the physical universe is. God is omnipresent in spirit everywhere in the physical universe. The physical universe is more real to physically incarnated beings, like us, than God is. You have to knowingly and willfully connect your spirit to God's spirit to connect with Him. And most spirits will choose not to. Many are called, few are chosen God constructed the universe in such a way that He can't elevate all of the spirits within it unless they connect on their side. Choosing God is your best choice. Which brings us back to good choices and bad choices. The hand of God is a zero or one proposition, where you make all the decisions. Ernest Hemingway's reaction to the plane crash was to choose to get drunk and acquiesce in being surrounded by Hemingway's sycophants, who followed suit. Getting drunk is the worst thing that you can do with a concussion. It's also the worst choice you can make in the face of terrifying enormity, but it's what Hemingway chose.
Hemingway was over halfway between his first African safari and his self-inflicted death by suicidal shotgun blast. He had made a number of choices in his life, most of them bad. The first plane crash was, I infer, a warning which he ignored, which led to the second plane crash. The two plane crashes happening that close together emphasizing the critical nature of where he was in his lifespan. Incapable of making good choices, the badness of his first choice led to his second choice, and the badness of his second choice sealed his fate. The second choice being to also ignore the warning. He was irretrievable and irredeemable by his own choice. Winning the Nobel Prize for literature was irrelevant id stuff, like fighting a sparkler while you're on the Titanic's floor deck as it's going down. He had chosen a bad end ,and a bad end he would have, both in this life, and I infer, in the next. I see reading scripture aloud as a signal beacon from an otherwise lost aircraft. You and I could discuss John's Gospel, Steve, and it's just, gibble gibble gibble, on both sides. But if you and I both read John's Gospel aloud then we're actually participating in the closest we have to God's actual presence in our world. The means by which God chose to reveal himself. Both our signal beacons are sending the same signal when we stick to scripture. The idea isn't to understand it, I don't think. It's to send it. Participating in it causes you to make better choices, the better your choices, the fewer bad choices you make. David Birdsong has been reading John's Gospel aloud in its entirety every Sunday. I read it aloud in its entirety every Monday and Wednesday. Maybe someday I'll stop, and he'll be the only one. Maybe someday he'll stop and I'll be the only one. Or maybe others will join us. Maybe others have already joined us. As I wrote to David, the important thing is to look at what you're choosing over John's Gospel. I know David was concerned about Christmas falling on a Sunday this year, breaking his streak. In our society, the, to me, anti-religious temptation to gorge yourself on bad food is always there. Along with excessive materialism, it's what Christmas is in our society. It's very tough to pull away from, speaking from 20 years of experience. Brittany getting married and that being a surprise would be a tough one for a Dad. Not being a Dad, I side with the Quran, “Your wealth and your children are only a Temptation.” I hope he managed to celebrate his only daughter's marriage, but I do think reading John's Gospel aloud was the wiser choice if he had to make a choice between the two. Faith and endurance. For my part, I fused my Sunday observance on Christmas reading aloud 10 chapters from the Torah in the morning, 10 chapters from Revelation at midday, and the last two hours before midnight the Quran. And my Christmas observance, reading four chapters from John's Gospel before each prayer time, and five before the last prayer time. And then three hours later the entirety of John's Gospel, it being a Monday. Monday, Boxing Day, the furnace konked out, and the earliest I could get a repair person was Thursday, so no heat in the Off-White House for four days. Which brings me to another aspect of Mungu Mkono. The Job rule is always in effect. With all of my strict religious observances, why was I being punished with no heat for four days? Never a valid question. If it's a punishment, you need to accept it and find redemption through the acceptance. If it's a test, you need to pass it. I hope I did. “The fifth belongeth to God and the Apostle”, it says in the Quran. Likewise, “Land to God at goodly long and he will double it to you again and again”, the origin of the zakab. Jacob vowed in the first book of Moshe 28:22 to give a tenth to God, the origin of tithing. I donate 20% of every dollar that comes into AV to the food bank of Waterloo Region. Accepting what I pay for groceries, I give as much money to panhandlers as I spend on myself. Monday and Wednesday, cookies and coffee, and the Toronto Sun and Waterloo Region Record. My subscription to the National Post and the Epoch time. It's a win-win, it keeps me from spending excessive amounts of money on myself, and ensures that some homeless person doesn't have to worry about food for a few hours. It's also, I infer, a good “if everyone visits the world would be a better place” theory. Just a theory, but it's my theory. Dialing your materialism down to five from eleven, and dialing your charitableness up to five from zero. That's my perceived experience with the hand of God. Are these good choices? I'll find out on Judgment Day. What I did was to inject Cerebus into that Hemingway narrative. Cerebus is subject to the same hand of God construct, bad choices lead to worse choice. He touches religion obliquely in “Rick's Story” and then makes the bad choice of Jaka over that religious sensibility. A bad choice option is always accompanied by a good choice option, and a worse choice option. The dualistic on-ramps arrive simultaneously in our lives with just time enough to choose which is the snake and which is the ladder. Cerebus, choosing snakes over ladders repeatedly, sees Ham Earnestway as a reward instead of the warning that he is. As the two plane crashes are to Ham Earnestway, so Ham Earnestway;s suicide is the Cerebus. A red flashing warning light. Ham Earnestway ignores his warnings, and Cerebus ignores his warning, and they both end up the way they end up. The moral of the story is “Don't let this happen to you.” Make better choices on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis, because everything matters. Microcosm to macrocosm, and it's your soul that’s at stake at every juncture. Mungu. Mungu Mkono. God. In the hand of God. Good luck with your lyrics, you may not rock the house like The Pointer Sisters did with “I'm So Excited” but any song grounded in Mungu Mkono, I infer, has to be a better choice and a better use for a musician's talent than the daughters of an Oakland California Minister singing about a one-night stand.
Matt: Right!
Dave: So there you go. We’re under two hours, Matt! High five!
Matt: Well, that's part of it is because as I said on the blog, I did the strip and I put it up a week ago, and I don't know if we're gonna be doing Please Hold, but if we are, this is the strip. And if you want to send questions, then go ahead. And like Larry sent his in, and that was it. Everything else was stuff that I had found, until Michael and Steve, and I'm like, oh okay! You know, somebody remembered, “Oh hey it's the first of the month!”
Dave: [laughs] Well, we keep going as long as we can keep going, and the time definitely always flies by. So you, you have a good night.
Matt: You too!
Dave: And say hi to Paula and the girls for me.
Matt: Yeah, I actually have to rearrange their bedroom because they sleep on a bunk bed, but the big one wants her own room, so she's kicking her sister out, and now I have to build the loft bed we bought to put over the guest bed that the big one wants, and it's shuffling deck chairs in the Titanic of, eventually these kids are leaving my house, I know that.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I don't want them to leave today, but if they're going to continue to whine about who sleeps where, they can go. [laughs]
Dave: Right. Right. Yeah, it's, girls especially, get to the age where, “No, my sister can't be here anymore.”
Matt: I love having daughters, the old adage that girls mature faster than boys is, I don't want to say mature, but girls advance faster than boys, I fully believe. Both my kids, top of their class for reading, writing, and arithmetic. I mean you know, I went to Natasha's parent-teacher conference, and what the teacher said, and I told her this, is word for word what they said five years ago about her older sister.
Dave: Yes.
Matt: These kids are just smart as whips. Meanwhile, I know little boys that are about the same age, and their parents are worried about how developmentally they're lacking, and I'm thinking maybe it's just that girls get there faster. One of the big feathers in my cap is both my kids are excellent readers. The school now, the reading levels instead of being like one through five or something like that, it's letters. So A is the basic, and it progresses from there both. Both kids are supposed to be… in first grade, you're supposed to be at like, what was it, like a F or G, and both my kids were like K's, L's. The problem they're running into is not that they can't read, it's that they can't read things at their reading level that are appropriate with the content.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And as the teachers say, it's a good problem to have, it's just really annoying cause they only have two or three books that advanced in the classroom, cause kids aren't supposed to read that well. And what I think it is, is when Janice was born and we were living in our apartment and getting the kid to go to sleep. All parents know newborns, when they sleep, it is the best thing in the universe! If you can make them fall asleep without any problems and they stay asleep, anything you do to maintain that state is the best thing ever. So like, we're watching TV but we have to turn the volume way down because we don't want to wake the baby.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So we put the subtitles on, so we're watching TV with subtitles. We're watching movies, we watch with subtitles. Well, we just got in the habit of leaving the subtitles on, so as the kids growing up and we're watching like “Sesame Street” and child appropriate shows, you know, they're hearing what Elmo's saying, but they're also seeing that there's words in the screen, and I think that…
Dave: Right! Right.
Matt: I think it was in, you know, it's because I was freaking out how am I going to teach my kid to read, like I've been reading for… I taught myself to read, cause I wanted to read Spider-Man comics. Like what am I gonna find that they want to read? And it turned out, all I had to do was turn the subtitles on and walk away, and they'll figure it out.
Dave: That's good! That's, more people should be doing that.
Matt: I advocated with both my kids teachers, you should tell everybody put the subtitles on. Cause now my biggest problem is like we go to the in-laws house and they turn the TV on and it's crap. They're watching crap, it's reality TV show crap. Like the last time we were there my mother-in-law's watching a show about customs in Australia. It's a TV show about customs officers dealing with foreigners coming into Australia, and they're kinda sketchy and sometimes… I'm not watching it, but it's their type thing, you know? It's kind of like, when you have a TV and you know if the TV's there it's distracting you?
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: And so like I'm not trying to watch this, but I'm watching and like the customer officer is going, “Well I don't want to be accused of profiling, but you fit our profile.” I'm thinking, how is this a TV show? Like this is a series, it's not just a one-hour special. It's 20 hours of television! Like 20 hours of your life watching somebody do their job and finding drugs, not finding drugs. But when we're there, they don't have the subtitles on, so like I can't hear the TV if someone's being loud. I'm like, wait, I'm not interested, but what did they say?
Dave: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt: So it's like, if they hand me the remote, “Well oh you can put out whatever you want” I'm like, oh the first thing I put on is the subtitles. Let's read a movie.
Dave: Right.
Matt: But yeah.
Dave: It's funny, Nick and Kristen, down the street, and their daughter Nola, and I saw them just before Christmas. And Nola, how old are you now? She goes, “I'm five” and she says, “My Mom says I'm five going on 18.” [laughs] And I said, uh no, Mom doesn't mean that in a good way. Kristen says, “We haven't had that conversation yet.” I'm going, okay, time for me to get away from here. Don't say things like that, because it's, as soon as I said “Mom doesn't mean that in a good way” her face went like, “Huh? What? I missed something here.” And that's definitely what you're talking about, the five going on 18 and, mhmm, you probably know more stuff than you should actually know, and you don't know a lot of stuff that you should know. So, good luck to all parents who have overachieving daughters.
Matt: Well, this is really quick and you'll love this one, so yesterday we were watching one of the Star Wars movies. Natasha says to me, “Where'd they film this?” and I jokingly said on location in space.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Because that's the tag at the end of “Hardware Wars” was filmed on location in space. And I just you know spit it out, it was a fun joke. She didn't think I was joking. She's like, “Wait, they filmed this in space?” and I'm like, well, remember when we were at Disney, we went on that ride, they got us on the spaceship and then we went up into the other spaceship, and then we came back down to the planet? And she's going, “Wait that was real?” and I'm like, of course it was! Why wouldn’t it have been?
Dave: [laughs] Bad daddy! Bad daddy!
Matt: And Paula was there too, and she's looking at her like, “What do you mean where did they film this? They filmed it…” And then I’m like, “They filmed it in England in a studio. You know, it's make-believe” cause whenever she asked me, “Is this a fiction?” I'm like, well usually when it's an animated talking dog, yeah it's make-believe.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. And meantime they're absorbing like a sponge all this stuff that they probably shouldn't be reading on the internet, and talking to each other, like they’re talking to their girlfriends where everything is allowed in some households. So they get to tell everybody stuff that, uhh no. That's where the 5 going on on 18 thing comes in. We'll leave it at that. We'll leave it at that.
Matt: Okay!
Dave: Have a good night! We'll revisit this, I'm sure, multiple times.
Matt: In the next 20 years of my life until these girls stop talking to me.
Dave: [laughs] That’s right. Have a good night, Daddy!
Matt: [laughs] You too, Dave!
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye.
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
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Dave's Variant for David Bransetter's Horace & Buggie Kickstarter. You have until New Year's Eve to get in on this.
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| click for bigger. |
And, coming in February, The 1982 Tour Book (click the link to be notified on launch).
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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.
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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 somethingth*?
*Sale dates are not final and therefore subject to change.
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 sketch for Michael. Kind of one of them "niche" items...
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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Next Time: Jen's LAST opportunity to talk SDOAR of 2025!
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