Hi, Everybody!
Mondays!
Dave sent #265 again.
I'll run it twice:
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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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So there was no recording for 11/2022, so there's no transcript. Which means we're now just three years behind.
[guitar music]
Dave: It’s the Ron Essler!
Matt: [laughs] It's a Ron Essler, but yeah, yeah. [laughs]
Dave: Oh okay.
Matt: I mean, technically I stole the name from some other kid, so he might still exist somewhere.
Dave: Theoretically Theoretically. But it's one of those, if it came down to a toss-up between you and him, I think at this point you are the Ron Essler.
Matt: I'll take it, but yeah! [laughs]
Dave: Alright. So, are we recording ?
Matt: We are recording.
Dave: Okay. “Dave! Well, the Weekly Updates are back, the Monday Reports are coming in, and it's the first Thursday of the month, must be time for the final Please Hold for Dave Sim.” Yeah, it's hard to believe that we're not gonna be doing these anymore, but, it's, uh, you know, it's one of those things. It's the final Please Hold for Dave Sim, “And we begin with one of us remembering Seiler. You? Me? Where's the ringer when we need him?” Actually, it's my turn to remember Jeff Seiler, so that lets you off the hook. And I think, have we talked about his Kansas City Royals book?
Matt: A little bit, off and on.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. That’s one of those things that keeps sticking in my mind, at the absolute end of Jeff Seiler's life, that would have been a major concern of his, was what was going to happen to that book. I forget what the actual book was, it was like an annual or a yearbook or the definitive history of the Kansas City Royals, and Jeff took it into his head to get an autograph from everybody whose name appeared in the book. Even to the extent of, I think it was Rush Limbaugh was mentioned by somebody in this Kansas City Royals book, and Jeff actually went to wherever Rush Limbaugh is/was and explained to the receptionist what it is that he was there for, and was hoping to get, and she went to wherever Rush Limbaugh was and explained the whole thing to him, and he agreed to sign it and he signed the book, but Jeff didn't get to meet him. He said that that was one of the few people who autographed the book, and said that he didn't actually get to meet in person. And word spread about this book, I guess through the Royals organization and through Major League Baseball, and I think that the Royals themselves were interested in having it for their archives, and there was some talk about Cooperstown, where the Baseball Hall of Fame is, that they were interested because he really put in the time and the legwork getting getting as many autographs as he could. And then the last year that he was alive, just before COVID-19 hit, he went to Kansas City Royals’ training camp and I think he got a lot of autographs there, as well. So it's one of those, if you've got something like that, obviously he could have sold it when he was alive and made a lot of money off of it, but it was one of those, no, this is one of the last things that the Jeff Seiler would think about selling. But once he wasn't here, then I think he was definitely looking for it to have a good Major League Baseball home, and not knowing what happened with the Jeff Seiler estate per se, I'm hoping that the the Kansas City Royals book at least still exists.
Matt: I'm hoping it exists, and I'm hoping that somebody knew what it was and it didn't just end up in the Goodwill pile.
Dave: Yes. Yes, so that's my Jeff Seiler story in terms of, you know, at the tag end of his life that, you'd have to pry that book out of his cold dead fingers. And I know he had a lot of other stuff, he had like autographed baseballs and things like that, and at one time we was talking about me coming there after he died, whenever that was to take place, and we didn't know that it was imminent, and that I would be attuned to that, in terms of, even if I don't know what this is, it’s definitely got collectible written all over it. So you know something different is going to have to be done with this, apart from, “Well, just give it to Goodwill and we'll call it a day.” And [laughs] had to phone Jeff and say, well, you know, this COVID-19 thing, they've shut the border and it doesn't sound like they're going to be opening the borders. So please don't die right now, and please don't die until they do have the border open again. And that went on for so long my passport expired. And it's like, uh, I'm not gonna go in the middle of the great Crush to get traveling again in Canada and get myself a new passport. So unfortunately, Jeff, you're going to be on your own in this one. So that's my Jeff Seiler story. You faxed through, “Then something Steve Peters sent in last month at the last minute.” And I guess as Steve wrote, “Check out Barry's comment on the picture. Ron Essler should share it with Dave on Please Hold. I'm sure it's good for a chuckle.” And then, filling in on this, it looks like it's the penciled “Conan” #16 cover. And Barry, I guess, weighed in on this when Mike Dubisch and Leonard Pederson were talking about it, and Steve Peters is saying that there's a comment written on the cover by Barry?
Matt: No no no! In the comments, where they're weighing in is, it's Barry's comment to them.
Dave: Right.
Matt: That's what Steve's talking about.
Dave: Oh okay. And Barry's saying, “It wasn't the printer who was complaining it was the fool at the Comics Code Authority. I wrote him a note asking how many women he knew who had pubic hair on their knee.” So what was it that that they were complaining about? It's “The Frost Giant's Daughter” story, which was in “Savage Tales” in black and white first, and was a little more risque visually, and of course, Barry was having a hell of a time trying to stick to the publishing schedule on “Conan”, so I think somebody got the idea, “Well, we’ll reprint ‘Frost Giant's Daughter’ in the comic book version, but the comic book version has to go to the Comics Code Authority, so there was a little too much daughter showing for the Comics Code”, that's the part of the story that I understand.
Matt: What I understand is, the actual image, it's, somebody owned the original pencils and must have sold it and somebody else got a hold of it and decided, “Oh, it would look better if we put all the trade dress on it and you'll make it look like the cover!” So that image, it's the original pencils have been inked, if I remember right, or at least tightened up real good, and then somebody slapped all the logos and lettering on to it as a presentation piece. It's one of those things where the guy that Steve found it on just keeps posting Barry Windsor-Smith art, you know, here's this, here's this, here's this, and so like I had to go back a month and find it. When I finally found it, I'm like okay, and I'm looking at the comments, I’m like… the comment that I sent you, I took a screenshot of, but I can't find that comment on the original post. I'm like, I don't know where this is from, I don't know. But it was one of these, Steve shared it to the Cerebus group like, “Oh yeah, Dave would be interested in this” and I'm like, yeah, but at the same time I just sent the fax for November, Steve. You gotta get through before the Wednesday!
Dave: [laughs] Right! Okay, alright. It's very interesting to look at, it's, I had no idea that Barry did the pencils separately at that time and then light-boxed them or something, and then inked it? Bcause I know he inked the #16 cover.
Matt: Unless that's…
Dave: Which wasn’t a guarantee at the time, Sal Buscema inked a fair amount of Barry’s stuff and they had a couple of nightmare issues where they had one of those “gang inking in the Bullpen” things, and it's like, [laughs] oh please, don’t gang ink Barry Windsor-Smith. And it was one of the earliest things that P Craig Russell worked on at Marvel in the Bullpen, was being part of this gang inking team on one of the “Conan” issues and said he just firmly hopes that his name didn't register with Barry Windsor-Smith because he would never live down having been part of this team butchery of last minute inking. But, “Conan” was a best-selling title, and a licensed title, with all of those requirements going into it. So it's like, when it comes down to a contest between art, and getting this done and to the printer when it needs to be there, sorry, art, you're out of business on this one.
Matt: I'm not saying it is but they could be the one I sent you was a preliminary that he did and sent in for approval and they sent it to the Code, and the Code went, “Oh no no, this won't do, it’s too salacious” and that's when Barry's comment of, “How many women do you know that got pubic hair on their knees?” [laughs]
Dave: Right. Yes, um, if you look at… they had head-to-head comparison. It was like, “The Frost Giant's Daughter” had these very wispy, completely transparent veil like things just hovering around her in the story, and they got widened so that they were covering more Frost Giant's daughter's flesh than were in “Savage Tales of Conan.” If you look at the original, she was a very hot looking Frost Giant's daughter, which given the age that BWS was at the time, is not really a surprise. You're gonna give him the story, “The Frost Giant's Daughter” and she doesn't really exist, she's just sort of like a temptation for luring Conan types through their doom, he's gonna make sure that she's got all of the allure that is promised in Robert E Howard's story.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay! Then, “Cleaning out the 786 photos on my (Matt’s) phone.” Seriously? 786 photos? Or is that like my Dad used to say, “I told you a million times, don't exaggerate.”
Matt: No no, when I plugged the phone into the computer to copy all the photos over it's like 786 items, I'm like, I know I've done this before so I'm gonna have duplicates when I copy them where it's gonna say, “Do you want to make two?” and I'll say no, but yeah, no, I just I hadn't cleaned the phone up for, uh, two, three years.
Dave: [laughs] Okay. Well at least it's two or three years. If it was 786 photos every month, I'd say there's better uses for your time.
Matt: Well it's stuff like the two trips to Disney, all the photos I took on my phone were on there, at least three or four different parades the girls marched in where I was, you know, sometimes I take a video of the parade and if it was a longer parade I just take pictures of, okay, here's this float, this float, that type of thing. And it was just one of those, oh yeah, I'll delete these later! And then later never came until now it's like, yeah, we're going on vacation again, I should probably clean the phone out. And so…
Dave: Really?
Matt: Oh, and then, it also included if I downloaded, like when I get the Monday Report on my phone as an email. If I click on it to read it at work, it downloads it to my phone. It's like, well, that's technically an image, so it's just, once in a while you gotta, ya know, that's the wonders of living in Buck Rogers’ time, where, yeah, okay, now we gotta clean this up otherwise we're not gonna be able to do things.
Dave: Right. Right. See that never happened in Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, they didn't anticipate the fact that Flash and Dale Arden would have to sit down with their cell phones and go, “Well, come on we're going to the ice planet, we better clear these photos off here or we're not going to have any room for the new photos.”
Matt: Well…
Dave: Anyway! Yes, you're right. “I think it's a photo of President Truman meeting with representatives of the National Cartoonists Society. Maybe Alex Raymond? I don't know, but here you go Dave.” Uh, yes, actually that's Alex Raymond in center of the photo, President Truman on his right, and to the right of President Truman is Ham Fisher, the cartoonist on Joe Palooka. And forward from President Truman is Milt Caniff, and they're all drawing the President in, I think the event took place in the Rose Garden. And it was, uh, I'm trying not to tell the whole story because this is one of those where Eddie Khanna went “Dig we must!” and kept digging and digging and digging, and finding out more and more and more about this, as we got more stuff from Ohio State University from Milt Caniff’s papers. It started with Ham Fisher, again the guy in the foreground who was drawing Joe Palooka, and it's interesting to me that Truman is obviously favouring Ham Fisher. I mean, he's supposed to be the model for these three cartoonists, and then there's another group shot where all of the cartoonists are holding up their drawings of Truman. But I think it's one of those, for Harry Truman Joe Palooka was a comic strip that he knew about, and probably read, and had read for years, and so, okay, this is the Joe Palooka guy. I don't think he would have known Rip Kirby from a hole in the ground, and I think the same would have been the case with Milt Caniff. He might have read Terry and the Pirates? But Steve Canyon, which was the strip that Milt Caniff was doing at this time, his second strip. Steve Canyon was Air Force, and Harry S Truman, I'm pretty sure, was Army and Army is just not inclined towards Air Force guys. So this actually dated back to-- what it was, was they were helping to sell government bonds, linked up with the Treasury Department. And what they were selling the bonds for was because of the police action in Korea, which wasn't called the Korean War because it was, you know, the United Nations time period, everybody trying to be on board with, “We don't commit war anymore. We join a universal police action against an aggressor”, in this case North Korea. And they got into a little bit of trouble with, well okay, when you're fighting World War II and you're selling war bonds, people understand war bonds. “Yes, I will buy a bond saying I believe that I'm gonna be on the winning side with the United States and this is worth investing to make sure that Nazi Germany and Japan are both defeated and I'll be getting my money back out of here with interest in five years. In the meantime, Uncle Sam, here's my bucks to help break the Axis, help defeat the Nazi Germany and and the Japanese.” Didn't have quite the cache in 1949, 1950, to sell bonds for a police action. So any help that they could get to try and get people engaged with it. And it was Ham Fisher, I think, met John Snyder socially, who was the head of the Treasury Department in, I think he goes back to the FDR Administration, but he was definitely the Treasury Secretary in Harry Truman's cabinet. And Ham Fisher, I think, went to him or contacted him and said, “Hey, you know, I was reading about your bonds that you're selling and that you’re looking to publicize it. How about Joe Palooka comes to the Treasury Department and meets John Snyder and says, you know, ‘Hey boys and girls! Moms and Dads! Buy your bonds! This is Joe Palooka right here in the office of John Snyder recommending that you do that.’” And it worked really good! Comic strips were a lot more popular back then than they are now, far more central to people's entertainment. So if Joe Palooka tells you, “Buy bonds and help us with this police action in Korea” and as I say, it worked the charm. So then of course all of the National Cartoonists Society cartoonists were sort of envious because it's like, Ham Fisher's rubbing elbows with John Snyder, and somebody decided to upscale it and go, “Hey, why don't we do a big trip with all of us going to see President Truman at the White House and we'll all do sketches of President Truman and this will be publicizing buy bonds, all of these National Cartoonists Society cartoonists and the President wants you to buy bonds.” And with the success of what Ham Fisher had done, it's like, “Uh, okay, we're not selling as many bonds as we were during World War II. Maybe this is something that would actually work.” And it actually did work. So that's the short version of the story.
Matt: So, book five of the Strange Death of Alex Raymond, or book four?
Dave: [laughs] Well this is one of those ones where Eddie and I sort of argue back and forth about it, because the Ham Fisher thing ties in with his big Feud with Al Capp, the guy who did Li’l Abner, because Al Capp got his start as Ham Fisher's assistant and then did a hillbilly family in Joe Palooka, and then decided he's gonna do his own hillbilly family and create his own strip, and this set off a giant feud between Ham Fisher and Al Capp. So it's very very difficult to tell the story of how that whole thing happened without dragging Al Capp into it. And it's like, okay, Eddie dug up a lot of stuff on the Al Capp/Ham Fisher feud, and I went, no, this is this is a separate book. If I start bringing Al Capp and Li’l Abner into this, and there's a lot of comic art resonances with Gone with The Wind with Al Capp and with Stan Drake. A proxy of Stan Drake and his first wife show up in Li’l Abner and it's like, if this isn't them intentionally, this is definitely an amazing comic art metaphysics. But it's like, no, I gotta drop some of these tendrils off of here, because I'm already on page 554 ,but Eddie keeps pushing for, “You can't tell the story properly without Al Capp.” Right, this is true, but I'm gonna do the best that I can. When I was talking to Owen Kline, the director who just did “Funny Pages”, which we've been talking about a bit, and he said, “I've been thinking of making this like part of my filmmaking oeuvre of ‘Owen Klein is known for doing movies that are all based in the comic book field and the comic strip field.’” And he was saying, “If I decided to do that, what should I do next?” And I was going, if you want a really interesting story, look into the Al Capp and Ham Fisher feud, which ended up with Ham Fisher committing suicide. Fictionalize that one, and you're off to the races. [laughs] This comes up with Eddie from time to time, he's like, “Well, if you're not gonna do it in Strange Death of Alex Raymond, what about after Strange Death of Alex Raymond?” Then it's like, no, no. [laughs] I'm gonna be all done with these rabbit hole laden stories. Ham Fisher versus Al Capp, which as far as I'm concerned Al Capp drove Ham Fisher to suicide, somebody else is is gonna have to do that one.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: But getting back to the picture, I'm pretty sure-- I was trying to find the original news clipping and I got the photos Eddie purchased from The Truman Library. So I've got amazing glossy photos, I actually got two of them framed on the wall of the office. This event took place, as far as I remember, I might be misremembering it, but it was October 2nd, 1949, which was Alex Raymond's 40th birthday. He got to go to the White House and draw a picture of Harry Truman.
Matt: Okay. Well like I said it was one of these I'm going through, it's, I copied everything, I'm going through deleting stuff, and I'm looking at, well do I need this on the phone? Is this something that, you know, it might come up where I need it and I'm like, I got to that picture. I'm like, why the hell is this on my phone?
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Like, was this “I saw it on Twitter and I saved it to the phone to send up for a Please Hold and then got busy and forgot about it?” Because that does happen quite frequently! But like you know usually I look at, oh yeah that's what this is. This one was like a, “Where did this come from? Is that Truman?” [laughs]
Dave: Yes. Yes, it is. There's another photo in the batch where there's at least 15 or 16 cartoonists and they're all standing around Harry Truman and holding up their drawings for the photographer, and Alex Raymond is directly behind the President, which is, I suppose, appropriate because he was the President of the National Cartoonists Society in 1949. At some point I'm going to have to do the meticulous research to identify all of the cartoonists holding up the pictures. I know Milt Caniff, I know Ham Fisher, I know Alex Raymond. Andriola who did Kerry Drake is holding up one. Rube Goldberg is in the photo holding up a picture of Harry Truman. Rube Goldberg of the Rube Goldberg Device fame, but there's at least five or six other guys where I don't know who they are. I pulled out my… the only year that I was a member of the National Cartoonists Society, 1988, I got their yearbook and there's a photo in the back of all of the cartoonists standing around the, I think it was called The Flying Cartoonist, they actually leased the plane flying from New York to Washington. And it's got pictures of all their cartoon characters stuck on the fuselage, and the names of the cartoonists at the bottom. So I have to cross-reference that with the photos at the White House. It's funny, the National Cartoonists Society credit says, “Here's all of these guys.” It identifies all of the ones that they know, and Marge Devine, who was the Secretary of the National Cartoonists Society for years and years, she was still the secretary the year that I was a member, and it says, “All gathered getting ready to board the plane to go to Washington to meet Harry Truman” And the last credit is 1954. [laughs] And I'm going, Harry Truman wasn't President in 1954! Eisenhower was President in 1954. So I don't think they were going to see Harry Truman at the White House in 1954, or we've got a major conspiracy thing going on here.
Matt: Well it took them that long to get everybody to agree to get on the flight!
Dave: [laughs] That’s right! Get enough of them sober so that the pilot would agree to take off. “Okay, two years in, I think we're ready to go with it.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay. This is Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania. “First there was the almost end of the Weekly Update on Fridays, now this will be the final Please Hold for. What gives?! What's a fan of Dave Sim going to do with all this free time now? I hope it's not something Manly Matt has done. Kidding!” And then you reply, “I think Michael's either confused or jumping to an erroneous conclusion based on me saying on AMoC that this was going to be the final Please Hold for Dave Sim of 2022. Of 2022, Mike! Of 2022! I mean, we can’t really hold it against Mike, he did suffer that head wound.” That's right! We've got photos. “Maybe we need to talk to Grace. Grace! Mike’s getting confused again. Where's his meds? And his pants?” Mike then asked, “Hi Matt, I thought of another question. Gotta get them in. Hi Dave, can we still send you or Matt questions when we come up with them, And have you respond through AMoC?” Yes, that would be fine, now that we won't be doing Please Hold for Dave Sim ever again. I'm pretty sure that Matt’s staying on as the interim head honcho at AMoC and we'll ask him really nicely that if anybody comes up with a question that they would have asked on Please Hold for Dave Sim, but now that Please Hold for Dave Sim isn't going to be done anymore, pretty please with sugar on it, can you forward the questions to Dave Sim? “Or should I go old school again and mail a letter when I come up with something to ask you, and hope you write back?” Yeah, that would work fine as well. If you've got a question for Dave Sim, and you want to send it to me in the form of a letter, I can either hand write, if it's a short answer, or type up an answer and fax that to Matt to post on A Moment of Cerebus, now that Please Hold for Dave Sim isn't going to exist. And then reply, “Of 2022, Mike! It's the final Please Hold because there are no more months in 2022 after December. Grace! Grace, we really need those pants. Grace!” So, I hope that's cleared everything up. Yes, I will be happy to answer questions now that we won't be doing Please Hold for Dave Sim anymore, and we'll be faxing the answers to Matt to post at A Moment of Cerebus, as I did last month! When Matt was, what was that one? That was Bullwinkle was in… don't tell me… don't tell me… I'm gonna think of it. 101 Dalmatians?
Matt: Correct!
Dave: How many times did you go and see 101 Dalmations?
Matt: Only once, because…
Dave: Only once?! You were gonna go a bunch of times!
Matt: So, I had two tickets to each of the four shows, and I was gonna take my Mom and my Dad separately, and my Mom had a babysit a kid, and because she was gonna go to the show, but she had to bring him along and we only had two tickets, I stayed home. So I only saw it once, but she was really good the one show I saw.
Dave: Was she one of the head dalmations? Who was she?
Matt: She was Chihuahua #2.
Dave: Chihuahua #2? I don't even remember Chihuahua #2.
Matt: So, the the way they do it is, there's four dogs of various breeds that are the narrators, and then when they do the twilight bark where the dogs are spreading the word about the missing puppies, they have the narrator dog come out with two more of that breed, so there's boxers, Scotties, Chihuahuas, and I forget the fourth one. But the chihuahuas…
Dave: Oh okay! Like Paris Hilton’s dog. A chihuahua!
Matt: Yeah so the chihuahuas come out, and they're the funniest part of that bit because they get to, they're talking but they're talking in Spanish, and then switching back to English, and switching back. And so it's like ay-yi-yi, or ay caramba. And of course, my kid being my kid, it's like, okay, you gotta practice your line, and she's doing the entire bit what all three chihuahuas are saying. I’m like, no no, just your part because when you're on stage you're not gonna be giving somebody else's lines, talking to yourself. And she's like, “Yeah, yeah. I know.” She has since performed the entire play, front to back, every character, four times that I know of.
Dave: Holy smokes!
Matt: She memorized the entire script.
Dave: Holy smokes. You gotta be careful, she might turn into an actress. Nobody wants to have an actress for a daughter.
Matt: [sighs] Well, you know, if she's making big money and I'm her manager, yes, yes I very much do! [laughs]
Dave: Oh no, just think of Miley Cyrus. Does that look like a happy result for a family?
Matt: Well that's, it's one of those, you know, I'm willing to let her get into acting, but at the same time, as long as she understands this isn't going to become your life. There's enough child star horror stories for me to be like, yeah, you can do a play once, twice, not every day, not on Broadway. I'm not going to California for you. I mean, I love my kid, but not enough to destroy her future.
Dave: Yeah, yeah. So, that brings us to Dave Sim confession time. I read lines with Mike Kitchen's daughter Raina, and she was in a play at school, Sherlock Holmes, I think, and I went, well, that was fun. So then I picked up copies of “Waiting for Godot”, and Mike and Raina and I did “Waiting for Godot”, and now Raina has become a professional actress. And it's like, oh Mike, I’m so sorry. [laughs] I’m not gonna take the full blame for it, but I really shouldn't have helped out with that, and it's like you know, watching video of her in the school play and it's like, alright, you're really good! You know exactly how broad the gestures have to be for being on stage, as opposed to being on film. And it’s like, oh no no no, you don't want to do this for a living. This is a nightmare! So I wrote her a long letter about all of my personal nightmare stories with actresses, and I'm sure it didn't dissuade her in the least. If she’s become an actress, well okay, unhappy ending somewhere up ahead. Too bad! She's a real nice kid.
Then moving onto page 6, Bill Usher asks, “If you could go back in time and make Cerebus differently, what would you change, if anything?” Uh, okay, my answer to that would be, and I don't believe in this, because it's like, as you say, I don't believe in hypotheticals, and I certainly don't believe in Monday morning quarterbacking your own life. But if I could go back and and say something to Dave Sim at the time about Cerebus, specifically the Cerebus character, it would be don't lose the fetus-looking legs that he had originally, where they sort of curve in and they're about the same length on Cerebus proportionate to his torso that a fetus's legs are and a newborn's legs are relative to their torso. That's inherently funny. That's genetically funny. You will get on women's good side just because it looks like a newborn's legs, but he's running around with a sword chopping people! The whole world was waiting for a a homicidal newborn, and I got fished in, first of all by BWS, doing the treetrunk-style Cerebus legs, and then Kevin Eastman jumped on that bandwagon, and then it was like, well okay, I guess this is what Cerebus’ legs should look like. And it's like, trading too much for too little. I traded a genetic level sight gag or something that's there's really nothing terribly funny about treetrunks. So having two of them on your character, you're killing your own gag, and that's only something that you know with 35 years of retrospect.
And Bill Usher asks a bonus question, “What are your favorite books or books you think more people should read?” Yes, you're right, Matt, the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran, but extending the question, I would say something that would be interesting to read tangential to the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran, in terms of, this has its own levels of mystery to it where it's not scripture, so there's more mystery to it than there is confidence that it's as accurate as scripture, as 100% founded in truth as scripture, I would definitely recommend “Plutarch’s Lives”, also known as “Plutarch's Parallel Lives”, which Plutarch wrote in pretty much in the immediate aftermath of Jesus’ resurrection. Plutarch lived until about 125 AD? I'm not sure if I'm remembering the dates correctly. I think he was born around 46 AD, so he was born maybe 10 years after the two crucifixions. And he writes this history of all of these celebrated personalities in Greece and Rome. And if you read it, they're very short episodic sort of things, one or two pages per figure. [laughs] A lot of times you're gonna go, “Wait a minute, did this guy actually exist?! I mean, you're writing about him as if he actually existed, but in my frame of reference, this is a Greek myth.” Plutarch was a Greek, but he had a Latin name that I forget, a triple barreled Latin name. So it's interesting to read because there is a lot of gray areas, as an example, he writes about Romulus and Remus as actual historical figures, the founders of Rome. So, but he writes about it in terms of them being suckled by the She-Wolf. And it's like, uhh… okay, how much of this am I supposed to believe ? Am I supposed to believe that Romulus and Remus were actually suckled by a She-Wolf, or is that part of the Roman Legend thing? And because it has survived pretty much intact from first century of the Common Era, it's like, well, this is what he wrote! It's not a matter of, “we got a lot of stuff pasted on here to try and help us fill in the cracks where Plutarch's original text doesn't exist.” Plutarch’s text exists in in this form. And they know definitely when Rome was founded, I forget the exact year 758 BC, 750 something BC? It's around there, which is interesting because Rome was founded at the same time that Jerusalem was being sacked by the Babylonians, which is what Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel and the lesser prophets are all about. So it's very interesting, you know, read it and go, okay, as far as people are concerned, as far as people in the first century of the Common Era were concerned, all of the intellectual classes in Greece and Rome, all of the Jews, this is a history. And we know when the Babylonian Conquest took place, we know when Rome was founded, but come on! Are you telling me these two babies were suckled by a she-wolf, and then raised up by them, and then they founded the Eternal City?
Matt: [laughs] Well, that's one of those, you know, it's “This is the history as we know it”, okay it sounds a little fishy to me, but alright.
Dave: Yeah! Yeah. So if you're talking about favourite books, or books you think more people should read, you know, definitely to understand reality, I think you need to read the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran. But to understand reality as it has been understood for the last 2000 years… Rome was founded and Plutarch was writing at a time when people in England were still basically swinging around in the trees, kind of thing. So to get all your civilizational ducks in a row, I would say you can't go too far wrong with “Plutarch’s Lives”. And I'm gonna have to take a break right now because this time of year the final prayer time is 6:12 Eastern time, so I will phone you back, and we will get to Bill Usher's third question.
Matt: Okay! That works,
Dave: Talk to you in a little while.
Matt: Alright, talk to you, then. Bye!
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: [whistles “Spanish Flea” poorly for far too long]
[quick guitar music]
Matt: Hello again, Dave!
Dave: Hello, is Ron Essler there, please?
Matt: [laughs] This is Ron!
Dave: [laughs] The Ron Esseler! Uh okay, I'm gonna go back to the “Plutarch's Lives” briefly since I can't imagine that too many people are gonna run out and buy the book on my recommendation. Just Google search the contents page for yourself, and just go down the list because each chapter is of the name of the person whose life Plutarch is talking about, and just ask yourself as you go down the list, “Self? Do I think that this is an actual person, or do I think that this is a Greek or a Roman myth?” And as we all know, a myth is as good as a mile.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And third question from Bill Usher is, “Will you attempt to make an ambitious comic like Cerebus again?” Uh actually I am doing an ambitious comic like “Cerebus” again. Strange Death of Alex Raymond is definitely very very ambitious, just ambitious in very different ways. I mean, the the amount of research material going into it, I mean just piles and piles of research material. There was virtually no research on “Cerebus” that would compare with that, apart from F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde. It is a luxury that you don't appreciate being able to make all this stuff up off the top of your head, and then just have to keep track of it. Compared to, “Okay, oh I've got that somewhere in these piles and piles and piles and faxes and photocopies, but where is it?” Case in point, today the National Cartoonists Society visit to Harry Truman's White House. I've got that article around here somewhere, and I've got a photo that I didn't get framed of the ceremony in the Rose Garden, but I could probably spend the next three days looking for it. Also the fact that if you include the groundwork done in in “Glamourpuss”, which is obviously where Strange Death of Alex Raymond started, that goes back to 2008, so I have now put in 50% of the time that I put in on “Cerebus”. It's more than 50% of the time that I put in on “Cerebus”, on a book that is to this point just slightly longer than “High Society”. So in terms of the research and in terms of having to keep this manageable, having to limit the parameters of the book so that it's not completely suffocating for the reader, it's dense-packed information. People can only read so much dense-packed information before their eyes start to glaze over. And I'm hoping that that's, the book's going to be interesting enough for people to read that they're not going to notice that they're on page 554 when they come to the end of “Pagan's Cheerful Summer” and when they're just about to dive into what I’m calling the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell, which is a fractal treatment of, there's no way that I can take all of these different versions of Margaret Mitchell's death and rationalize them into a single narrative. So here's as many of them as I think are credible and told as close to simultaneously as possible.
Matt: Well, you know the problem is that after you learned how much 500 pages holds, and then you did all the other books, now you have that razor sharp, “Okay this is what I can do” focus. But at the same time, like you said, you have mountains and mountains of, you know, you could randomly grab anything from any stack and go, “Well, there's at least two pages here.”
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, or the the other experience like looking for stuff today and I'm going, oh I completely forgot this part! Yes this definitely has to go in, and it's like, I'm holding it in my hand. Well as soon as you put it down it gets lost as a drop in the ocean again. So there will definitely be coming points up ahead where I'm going to have to take a good three or four days off from actually producing the book, and just review the material. And it's been the process all along. It's, what is the AAA material that's just going to make people's jaws drop and go, “Oh, you just made that up!” And it's like, [laughs] no, believe me it would be very very comforting for me to say I just made that up. I didn't make just make that up. Here's the newspaper article that this is from, here's the book that this is from, here's the interview where they talked about this, and then just connect the dots tic-tac-toe.
Matt: I'm gonna have to ask Eddie how many volumes the companion book’s gonna run of, “Okay, page 28, here's the four pages of articles that factored into that page.”
Dave: Right. Right. And Eddie is just starting, I think, to appreciate how much of his life this is going to eat up doing that. I've avoided sending him more annotations on the stuff that I've been working on, because he's up to his eyeballs as it is. I mean, I've got it all printed out here, he's got it in digital form, so he does have kind of an advantage that he can just follow the bunny down the rabbit hole on his laptop and go, “Okay, Ward Greene, type that in. Subhead this, subhead this. Okay, there it is. That's what I was looking for.” Because he's doing the online annotations as another of his full-time jobs in addition to the one that he actually gets paid for, I try to just leave him to that, because this whole thing is is definitely going to, has been, and will continue to telescope on us. Which is one of the reasons that I definitely had to come with a successor, and I had to come up with somebody where, okay, it's all inside this house in this location. This all gets transferred to you, and you will pick up where I left off and going through the same experience, going through all the pieces of paper and stuff that's on my laptop, and going, oh, I had completely forgotten about this. This definitely needs to be mentioned.
“Dave Kopperman has an idea to make you some of that money we've heard so much about.” Yes, we hear a lot about money. “Just putting my comment from the other day up to Dave,” and thank you, David. “The Waverly ‘Form & Void’ arrived yesterday, and it is again a thing of beauty.” Yes, I haven't seen a copy yet, but Dagon told me that he got them in and Marquis did their usual jaw-dropping job on it. “Kudos to the usual team. I actually rather liked the blue cover with gold stamps. Definitely gives it the vibe of a period hardcover of one of Hemingway's books once you've mislaid the dust jacket, as one does.” Well, if you're a pathological collector, you don't mislay dust jackets as was done historically. They didn't used to actually even illustrate the dust jacket, it was just there to keep dust off of it while it was in the store until you bought it, and then you just threw the dust jacket away. “Maybe a smallish way for Dave to make a little extra scratch is to design the dust jacket for people who have bought hardcovers print on demand? I could totally see him killing it as an exercise in mid-century design and flap copy. I'd personally be happy to buy one if the price were reasonable.” [laughs] Oh! Right there! See, that's where we start to get into “diffugalies”, as my Dad used to call them. Reasonable and profitable are two different categories in this day and age. “And Lord knows the hardcover completist out there would be happy to spend unreasonably as their budgets allow . Could even be a sale piece for people who didn't buy the hardcover! The flat with ‘unfold here and trim’ markings and those that want it for the hardcover got theirs, and those who don't can have it as a poster. Heck, there's many that would buy two to cover both bases. Thanks, Dave Kopperman.” Um okay, just off the top of my head on that one. I don't see there being enough money in it for me to devote money making time to it. I mean, my time is divided between Strange Death of Alex Raymond, which is “this has to be done properly and very specifically the way I picture it in my mind and if that just takes way too long that just takes way too long”. We’re working on ways to monetize Strange Death of Alex Raymond, starting from what is page 154, 153 in SDoAR Carson, which is what everybody has now. And the last page of mock-ups that I've done, page 554. So there's 300 Pages there to monetize and make available in some way that hopefully won't involve me personally having to do anything now that my side is producing the pages. When it comes to money making things, things Christon H out in California sending me a money order for $2000 U.S. and a blank Cerebus Sketchbook cover, and I fill it up and send it to him, and then he sends me another check with another sketchbook cover, obviously that[laughs] I don't think that's going to go on forever. But that's the money-making category that I picture. People are not going to buy $2000 dust jackets the 100, 120 people who have bought the “Form & Void” hardcover aren't going to be paying $100 for a dust jacket. So it gets into I need the most bang for the buck, or things where okay, I'm doing this to make money. It's not a part of me that says, “Form & Void” needs a dust jacket. So it's not that compulsive creative itch that has to stay at the center of my art, and it's not something that would make money. I think the compromise position would be if you or somebody else wants to do a dust jacket using the existing artwork. I mean, the Remastered Edition is pretty clean, so all you would be doing is mocking up the dust jacket. “Here, I think this Ham Ernestway, this figure of Cerebus, and we'll do this Photoshop trick fusing the one to the other, here's a couple of panels in the background burned out to a light gray, or here's everything in colour.” I certainly wouldn't tell anybody, “No, you can't do a dust jacket for my book!” If you already paid really really good dinero for the hardcover, if you want to design your own dust jacket, and either just have it be your dust jacket, which would require getting the digital files from Sean Robinson and using the best quality scans to make a a dust jacket, you can do that and then you could say, “Okay, here's the dust jacket that I mocked up for myself, and now have a finished version that I got them to print out at Kinko's. Anybody else wants this, you have to send Dave Sim money. You're gonna have to send Aardvark-Vanaheim,” and you pick a number out of a hat of how much they would have to pay you to use your dust jacket and pay Aardvark-Vanaheim to use your dust jacket. I could see that! And we’d probably be lucky to get five people in each category. But in terms of, this is how much time it would take for me to sit down and have, well first of all I would have to go through every page of “Form & Void” again, which I just did, and I would have to pull out images and I would have to size them on the photocopier, and pick out a typeface that I liked or use the logo that I already drew, and try to come up with, as you say, what we'll be looking for is a… exercise in mid-century design and flap copy, because that's a very specific thing. And I think you're right, that would be, if you were going to make up a dust jacket for “Form & Void”, that's what you would want to have in mind, and that's another part of the exercise. Okay, how many mid-century books do I have or have access to? And, okay that one looks really good, let's do that. What's that typeface called? Okay, now I gotta go looking for the typeface through all of my typefaces. And it's like, ehh, if I can do a two-hour painting of Cerebus and Jaka on a sketchbook cover and get $2000, that's probably where I'm gonna be putting my time in.
Matt: Well my thought is, I kinda wonder if Gerhard would be interested in doing a dust jacket and running with the idea. Because in my head I'm thinking a good cover would be, it's a landscape with a diagonal, kind of tear from one corner to the other, bottom corner to the top corner and on the top side it's the winter, and the trees are bare in the snow, and the bottom side is Africa, and I'm going, that would look really neat! If I had thousands of dollars, I'd pay Gerhard to do that for me, but I don't have thousands of dollars.
Dave: Right, and from what I understand, Gerhard’s pretty busy as it is, he’s got a list as long as his arm of commissions, so it's not like, well I suppose if you just won one of those landmark lotteries that we have these days. Because I just read about a guy that won 70 million dollars? [laughs] Yeah, if you had 70 million dollars, and you were willing to give Gerhard two of those, or five of those, or eight of those to put all of his commissions on hold to do your “Form & Void” dust jacket. I can't speak for him, but I think arguably he would say, “Yeah, that's a go.” He might want to spend two or three months on his boat somewhere tropical before he started on it, but definitely I think he probably move you to the top of his list.
Matt: Well, for a couple million dollars, I think just out of necessity, Gerhard would have to take his boat down to Cuba to go to the Hemingway Estate down there and just make sure he got the vibe right. “It's a fact-finding trip, Matt! I'm going for fact finding!” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] That's right. That's right. And buy a recreated Ernest Hemingway's boat The Pilar, and “There, I'm gonna cruise around on Ernest Hemingway's boat. Actually a facsimile of it, but with all of the modern conveniences.” But like you say, just to get the vibe.
Matt: Well, I mean, to be fair, I think Gerhard would only charge a couple of grand for the cover, it's all the expenses to make the cover, that's where you get up into the millions. [laughs]
Dave: Well there you go. There you go. There would be no way to keep you out of the newspaper if you won 70 million dollars so, he knows there's more where that came from, so drum up those expenses. Let's make this happen.
“The other day because I didn't really have any ‘good’ moment,” uhh, how often does that happen?
Matt: Uh, at least once a month where there's a day where, “Okay, you gotta do the blog today.” It's like, I got nothing. Nothing came over the fax…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I've run all the good photos Rolly sent me, Margaret didn't give me a good launch pad from the Notebook post, it's you know, it's Tuesday, what are you gonna do Matt? And it's like, I got nothing.
Dave: So you posted the contents page to the first “Cerebus” volume.
Matt: It was, I posted the contents page, the Aardvarkian Age map, the “Never Pray for Change” page, one of the blue line pages from the first signature of “Melmoth” that I got off eBay, and then the signed first page where it said “Melmoth” that you signed going, “A rare one-of-a-kind blue line for the first signature”, and then I signed off, “There's got to be a moment in there somewhere.”
Dave: [laughs] “And John G commented,” see, how about that? You're just, “Okay, I’m just gonna
think of something off the top of my head and throw it on there, because I need something for today.” And what excites the comment, is that one, “John G commented, Dave didn't include ‘MagiKing’ in the ‘Cerebus’ volume one reprint collection? Hmm. I wonder why not. Seems like it fits pretty well between #12 and #13, and it's even referenced in an early panel of #13, Cerebus recalls snatches of a bizarre dream. Maybe just space concerns? ‘Space’ as in room in the book, not as in the universe.” Uh, the problem with “Cerebus” volume 1 is always, where do you stop when you start putting stuff in there? It's like, “Demonhorn” definitely belongs in there. The Comics Buyers Guide strips, the Prince Valiant parody, definitely needs to be in between 13 and 14. You know what I'm saying? If you start going through Alexx Kay's timeline, then you get into all of the “Cerebus Jam” stories. The “Cerebus” volume one is already 500 pages plus. You would be surprised how quickly the page numbers add up and it's a decision-making process that I haven't revisited since I abandoned it. The “Cerebus” volume is right over there on the side table next to the desk, and I would be the most surprised guy in the room if I looked at the contents page. “This isn't in there? This isn't in there? Which printing is this?” At some point after I’m dead, maybe long after I'm dead, somebody is going to do the definitive “Cerebus” volume one, and somebody's going to publish it. Or if not publish it, make it available as a print-on-demand. It would be one of those, “Who's bothered by this?”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And… what's that?
Matt: Well, because this turns into the miscellany discussion of, you know, why doesn't Dave do the miscellaneous? Like, well because there's 16 other books that he's got to, ya know, those sixteen plates gotta keep spinning, plus work on SDoAR, plus bring money in to keep the lights on. At a certain point, it's just there's not enough time and/or money or interest to make a miscellany volume worth it. But years ago, around 2005, 2006 when the push in the Yahoo Group, that's how long ago we were talking about it, was,”Oh yeah, the miscellany volume, what would we put in there?” And everybody's going, “Well, it's got to have this, and it's got to have that” and the problem is, A), it's half color, half black and white, or you know…
Dave: [laughs] Right. It's got the Young Cerebus stories at the beginning of it.
Matt: And the other problem is, if you just did the black and white stuff, and it was not, I don't want to say bare bonesb but it was the black and white stuff that wouldn't cause any headaches legallyb like the Turtles or Spawn, which, I understand has been cleared up, but at the time, they were, it was nebulous of “Would Todd and Kevin and Peter be okay with reprinting that stuff?” And so, okay, you cut those out, and so now, what are you left with for black and white? And it's too thin to be a phonebook, but too thick to be just a really big thick comic and you know it's not going to fit on a shelf right. And I always thought the best thing that somebody could do, would be, okay, all the stuff that you know belongs in that first volume, pack it in there with the first volume, but split in half, and then have volume one “Cerebus” and volume 1.5 “The Aardvark.”
Dave: Yeah, again, it's how important is this to anybody? Like, after I'm dead it's really up to anybody who would want to do it, because them it’s, everything really is in the public domain. It's like, Margaret, does this really bother you? Like, would you like to have the equivalent of the all-in-one “Bone” volume version of “Cerebus” volume one, where it's practically a cube because it's so thick, but it's got everything in there? I mean, the remastering is not as difficult to process as it was, so it would definitely make a a unique book. It's not something that in my mind I go, “If I die before that giant book gets put together, that's the reverse of ‘The Wizard of Oz’, it starts off in colour and then goes to black and white.” You know, it's just not something that concerns me, but I can certainly understand somebody going, “No, I definitely want that book.” In which case, we're almost back to Dave Kopperman's dust jacket thing. It's like, why don't you make one of them up for yourself? If you're really really ardent on this, and you are the OCD completist that Margaret can only pretend to be, like you just make Margaret look like a part-time Cerebus hobbyist, and you are determined to do “Cerebus” from the beginning of the story. The complete canon right up to the beginning of “High Society”. No ifs, ands, buts, or maybes. “Miami Mice” has to go in there, everything has to go in there! All of the different different colour covers. Start merging it with the colour volume with the stuff in the back, and just figure out, ”Okay, how many pages is this going to be? How much does it cost me to produce one of these?” And if it turns out to be whatever it turns out to be, 1800, $2000, $3000, then you can say, “Okay, I got mine. Anybody else wants one of these? And you can have all of the groundwork that I put into it, for a small fee of $1000 for me and $1000 for Aardvark-Vanaheim.” I don't think there's that level of Interest out there, but you never know. All you need is one person where describing it as OCD completist is being charitable, they're beyond OCD.
Matt: [laughs] Well, and then of course, the question becomes, okay, so say you're grabbing all the miscellaneous stories. The “1995 Tour Book” / the “1995 Not the World Tour Book”, if you were grabbing all the stuff from there, do you take the the jam with Chester Brown and put that in there, or do you say, “Well, it's not really Cerebus, but he's in the one panel!” So that's when my mental OCD collector goes, you own both copies of the “Tour Book”/ “Not the World Tour Book”, it's not like you don't have it. You can read it whenever you want.
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: They're right there on the shelf. And it's, I try not to, I mean, as the Moment of Cerebus guy, I should be the most obsessive guy there is. It's like, yeah, but then at the same time it's like, there comes a point where you got to be, you know, there is such thing as a bridge too far.
Dave: Yes. Yeah, and you're never going to come up with a format that everybody's going to be happy with. It's just because of human nature, and there are people who are going to go, “I don't really want ‘Miami Mice’ in there. I don't want the issue of ‘The Flaming Carrot’ that's got Cerebus going, ‘Mr Geepus the Sweeper.’” That is a bridge too far, but again, there's somebody out there who it’s no, no such thing for them. If Dave Sim drew it and it’s Cerebus and it was published somewhere, as far as they're concerned, it's canon and it belongs. And anything short of that, you get into very lengthy debate with everybody. Where does Spawn 10 fit in the Cerebus canon? Turtles, I put the date in the book, so that one is, definitely it fits in between this “Cerebus Jam” story, and this “Cerebus Jam” story. It's going to be a very very odd read, I think, would be the most charitable way to put it.
Matt: Right. I mean, that's one of those, whenever the miscellany value comes up, there's guys that have done digital versions of it of, “Okay, here's I've made scans of my copies and here's everything.” And there's people that, you know, some people are like, “Well you gotta have this in” and other people are going, “No you don't need the back cover of the original Guide to Self-Publishing, cause that's the inside cover, as long as you have the inside cover you don't need the back cover.” It’s like, but… do ya?
Dave: Right. Right. “Are we completists or are we completists?” and the only answer to that question is yes.
Matt: I mean… there's a part of me thinking, well you know, we could mock something up and we get a quote from Alfonso to print one up. Okay so, say we do the two volume set idea, and we have Alfonso print to set up, okay, what's that gonna cost? And all right, now we want 50 more of them, how quick can we get those? And oh wait, convention season’s starting, so he's like, “Ehh, can we hold off?” And you know, that's…
Dave: Right. Right. It is one of those things that if somebody got interested enough in doing that, and had enough spare time to work on it, we could produce one book called “The OCD Cerebus” volume one, just for the fun of it. [laughs] “Fun” in quotation marks because it's not going to put itself together. And then auction it off through Heritage Auctions, that might produce money for our Aardvark-Vanaheim, because it would be, “Well, if you actually look at it . You actually try reading it. We will be lucky to sell the one copy and we're probably only going to sell the one copy because there is only one copy.”
Matt: Well it's, I know you did the hardcover “High Society”s that you got through Heritage, and I don't remember what those sold for, if money came in, or if it was one of those “it barely covered the shipping to ship them to Texas.”
Dave: Closer to that, than kidney-shaped swimming pool time. Because Heritage Auctions really revolves around, A, the artwork, and B, the serialized comic books. In the same category, Doug Sulipa, who I trade “Cerebus in Hell?” monthly issues for the Canadian price variants, I asked him when we started doing “Swords of Cerebus in Hell?”, do you want “Swords of Cerebus in Hell?” and he went, “No. No, definitely not.” For the guys in the collecting end of things, collections are not really worth the money that it costs to produce them. The original comic books, that's where the money is, and at the hockey stick curve of 9.8 or better.
So that covers that one, Dave… or, uh, John G, to the best of my ability. And moving on to MJ “Mike” Sewall. Hello Mike again! “How did the ‘Form & Void’ Remastered campaign go bottom line wise? And will the success/failure/kind of, sort of, okay sales result inspire more remasters? If so, which one is next? MJ ‘Mike’ Sewall, your forever fan until I die and my kids go through all my stuff and say ‘Cerebus? What's this?’ and sell all my stuff at a yard sale.” What was it you said… let me turn over the page here. Matt says, “Not great. ‘The Last Day’.” Yes, to both of those. Sales were… Aardvark-Vanaheim will be getting a cheque for about $4000 U.S. from Waverly Press for the hardcover, AV’s 50% share. AV is paying Waverly Press $4000 for the softcovers, because it's on the same bill, and my accountant would kill me if I just sort of traded the one for the other. So I sent Dagon a cheque for $4000 U.S. today, he'll be sending me a cheque for $4000 U.S. Diamond Comics will be paying for the softcovers that they got, and I don't think that's around $4000 but it's around $3000 U.S. something like that, which in Canadian would be about $4000 or something. It is something that needs to be done just to keep the remastering process going. To keep the hardcover fans satisfied because doing them as fast as we can is still incredibly slow, and my level of interest in hardcovers is still zero. So it's not full speed ahead, but it is, yes, as soon as “The Last Day” is done and there's a Kickstarter for “The Last Day”, and it's solicited through Diamond as a softcover and the hardcover is made available. As soon as that's done, then it will be onto the next remastered book, but probably with something in between that I am interested in, like “The 1982 Tour Book” which Dagon tells me is virtually all done, it just needs needs to be printed, and it just needs to be slotted in somewhere where we're not overdoing it on selling really expensive stuff to really ardent Cerebus fans. “And give your kids my email address and I’ll help Margaret pick up she doesn't have already.” You know, there is a kind of balance to the universe that for every time that the kids go through Dad’s most cherished possessions and go, “Ew! What's this?” and, like you say, sell it at a yard sale, or has happened with at least some of Jeff Seiler's artifacts, just took it to the nearest comic store and just took whatever amount of money that they were offering, it helps to keep the stores going. Store gets a a nice payday on this because they pay less than they would have to for somebody that knew what they had. They can sell it to somebody who's really ardent on getting it and will be happy to pay a premium price for it. So it will eventually go for the prices that it should have gone for, but everybody gets a little merry Christmas in between. [laughs] Which is not to say, don't give Matt Dow’s email address to your kids and leave Margaret out of this, but that too is a possibility.
Matt: Well that's, every now and then somebody will be like, will go on the Facebook group of, “I'm downsizing my collection. I have all this, if anybody's interested in it.” You know, they're giving decent prices for stuff to people that are interested, and I think, you know it's a great idea to, because none of us are getting younger, so having a plan for, “What do we do with with the Cerebus collection when fans start… okay you know either I'm dead like Jeff or just I'm downsizing my life and I don't need to have 300 comic books and 16 phonebooks and this and that.”
Dave: [laughs] Sorry.
Matt: You know, it's a good idea, yeah that's why I keep throwing out there, hey, you can always email A Moment of Cerebus and we'll find a home for whatever you have, but you got to let us know you have it. Don't have the plan of, “Well, the kids will figure it out.” Well, yeah, the kids aren't going to care. “These are the using them weird smelling old comical books that Dad kept going, ‘no no, those are worth money’ and it's like well yeah they would have been worth money if Dad had slabbed them but he didn't.”
Dave: [laughs] And if Dad didn't read them all the time! “Dad! Stop reading your comic books, you're making them not in mint. Dad! And that’s my college fund!”
Matt: You know, a 9.8 of some of the white covered issues are probably going to end up being real rare, just because it's a white cover. White covers don't age well, especially if you're handling them.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: But I encourage anybody, if you got a collection and you're worried about what's gonna happen to it, and especially if you have an artifact type thing like here's the letters and sketches from Dave, hey, the PO Box address is pretty well known. Just mail it back, Dave’ll take it.
Dave: Right. And one of the things that you can do, is like go to your local print shop and say, “Can you make up dollar sign stickers for me?” [sneezes] Excuse me. Just a sticker that's got a dollar sign on it, and you take the stickers and put them on the the back of the comic books that are bagged and boarded that would go for a lot of money, and save your kids the aggravation. It's like they just go through the comic books and go, “Here's a dollar sign. I found another dollar sign. Oh this one's got two dollar sign stickers on it, put this one aside. No, that one's mine! No, that one’s mine!”
Matt: Well that's, my Grandpa was a coin collector because… [laughs] he got this deal because he would he would count the collection plate at church, and the deal he made with the priest was, penny for penny. “Any coins I find, I will pay you what they're worth, penny for penny. I find this penny, I find that penny, I will give you pennies. Like, nickels, dimes, same thing.” And so he had an extensive coin collection because not only did he count the money, but he sorted it. Like a 1943 copper penny cause that was when the war was on, they made them out of steel but they accidentally made a run out of copper, and he had a roll of 50 of them. And the guy at work just told me that there's one up for auction that's expected to go for like $7000, and I'm thinking, yeah, Grandpa had 50 of these things!
Dave: [laughs] There you go. There you go.
Matt: When he started losing his mind, cause he had a series of microstrokes and I believe it was before he died, but he was losing his memory, my Grandma took it in to get the collection appraised without telling anybody. And when my Aunts found out, they were like, “No, get it back” and when she went to the store to get it back, we're pretty sure Grandpa wasn't saving Chuck E Cheese tokens.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: The guy had basically went, “Oh you want that collection back? Well here.” Because it wasn't like she had a record of what she brought there, she just took it in, “What's this worth?” ”Well it's not worth much.” It’s like, yes it is!
Dave: Right. Right. See, that's got a kind of justice to it, as well.
Matt: And that's it's one of those things where it's like, you know, my kids are gonna take my collection and like I know I have books that if they were in pristine condition would be worth thousands of dollars. In the condition I have them in, maybe hundreds. But it's like, they're not gonna know that “Amazing Spider-Man” 363 is worth money, they're just gonna know it's another goddamn Spider-Man comic in this box.
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: And like, my best friend and I reconnected, and he was like, “Hey do you still have that run of Spider-Man you had when we were kids you used to keep in a shoebox?” Like, yeah. “Can I borrow it?” Sure, but it's kinda worth money, so be careful with it. He's like, “Really? Your Comics are worth money?” I'm like, in theory. In theory it's kind of worth money. [laughs]
Dave: Right.
Matt: Like, the first Hobgoblin, that's a couple hundred dollar book. The one I have, in the condition I have it in, it's a ten dollar book.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Matt: I mean, that's I remember when Eddie was visiting and you were in the hotel and he's in the Off-White House, and I was talking to him, he was like, “Oh there's all these amazing things!” And I'm like, yeah, and someday they'll be yours forever and ever until they’re somebody else's.
Dave: [laughs] That’s the thing! That’s the things. You can’t take it with you. When Mike Jones was here, the guy that's helping Bill and Nadine Messner-Loebs, he was talking about visiting with Tom Orzechowski, who's he's been friends with for years, and Orzechowski was getting, what was it from? Working with Todd McFarland, he would get 200 copies of each issue of “Spawn” when they came out. [laughs] And Orzechowski finally went, “Uhh, no, you have to stop this. Just send me like ten. The entire basement, or whatever it is, is filled up with ‘Spawn’ back issues.” But the thing is, right around the time that he stopped getting the 200 was when the books were getting rare because the sales were going down, so those are the ones that are going for good money. Which is, kind of my same theory with “Cerebus in Hell?” It's like, okay, you're pitching your hissy fits because it's not sitting with your politics, and Dave Sim is ruining his legacy. [laughs] Every month I put out a new Cerebus #1 that only has half as many copies as the original “Cerebus” #1. I think that's going to show up in the balance bands somewhere up ahead. Probably not while I'm alive, but it will be like, “You have a complete set of ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ How in the heck did you find a complete set of ‘Cerebus in Hell?’” So, and on that note, we're gonna wrap this up because I've been fasting all day, so I wanna go and eat.
Matt: Okay! That's fine. So, now, let's just clarify. Is this for real the final Please Hold, or are we just messing with Mike?
Dave: [sings badly] I'm so glad we had this time, together! Just to have a laugh, or sing a song! Seems we just get started and before you know it, comes the time we have to say… have a good night, Matt!
Matt: [laughs] All right, Dave! Maybe next month, maybe not!
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
I'm planning on sending up the January Faux for Please Hold For Dave Sim on Monday, so get your questions in to momentofcerebus@gmail.com please.
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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:
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: Jen?
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