Hi, Everybody!
Mondays!
What I'm saying, is that lists of verses are really hard to keep track of...
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Jesse Lee Herndon has caught up to Dave and I on the Please Hold Transcripts, And since I'm out of Proto-Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, I may as well start knocking out these transcripts.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
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[guitar music]
Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt! How are you doing?
Matt: All rightish.
Dave: Good! Did you get your shower and everything?
Matt: Yes, I am clean. I'm not doing this dirty.
Dave: That's good. That's good. I wish I could say that.
Matt: [laughs] Is it that hot and sweaty up in Canada?
Dave: Uh, it's actually been muggy the last couple of days. We got rain after not having rain for a long time.
Matt: That was probably the rain we had the other night.
Dave: Yeah? Well, it's one of those things where it's always climate change. If it's dry and and hot and there's drought, that's climate change, and if it rains for a couple of days really hard, and that's climate change. We used to call that weather.
Matt: Well see, but, that's so 20th century, Dave! You got to get with the modern times. Everything has to be 17 syllables or else it’s not real!
Dave: I know! I know! I know! I know! I know!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay. So are we recording?
Matt: We are recording. I mean, here's what kind of crazy world we live in. Warner Brothers spent millions of dollars to make a Batgirl movie, and apparently have decided they're shelving it, and never releasing it ever. They only did it for tax purposes.
Dave: Uh, that's a theory. [laughs] I think that DC's gotta be getting gun shy about… what's the newest one? The SuperPets one. I was reading it cost 90 million dollars to make, and had like a 15 million opening weekend?
Matt: That's, you know… it's a good thing about having your own intellectual property that you can say, “Ehh, yeah, I don't think this is gonna work out. I don't want to do that.”
Dave: Yeah. Yeah, I would not envy the good people at AT&T having no idea how any of this works as, nobody knows how any of this works. It's one thing to go to Las Vegas and gamble with a few hundred dollars, but once you're up around $90 million every time you sit down at the roulette wheel, and you keep losing consistently, which you could end up not having an AT&T before you know it.
Matt: [laughs] I’m sure…
Dave: Okay!
Matt: Moving on!
Dave: “We start with the usual”, as you say. “I believe it's your turn for a Jeff memorial”, and yes it is. This is just a quick little story. Jeff, who had a twin brother. The twin brother had a severe illness a couple of years back. Severe enough that he was in hospital for a length of time, and Jeff found out about that. And Jeff flew down to the down to his place to do the the next of kin duties, staying at his brother's place, and doing a giant pile of laundry, and cleaning out all of his twin brothers beer empties, which sounded like a major task in itself. Jeff and his brother really really didn't get along, so this was definitely all good Samaritan stuff on on Jeff's side. Jeff was like troubleshooting for his brother's tenants. His brother had a large enough house, it wasn't like an apartment building, or anything, but it was a triplex or something. And like I say, Jeff was doing some troubleshooting with tenants. My mental impression is that he was there for like a good week or two, and uh, [laughs] I remember Jeff telling me about how freaked out his brother's cats were. Because this guy looked like their owner, and sounded like their owner but you know, as only animals can intuitively understand they could tell this wasn't him! I think that's a funny story, because that's to me why cats are so endearing. They're really stupid, and they get freaked out by things we understand, and they couldn't possibly understand. Stupid is endearing. Patronizing on our parts, yes. Condescending on our parts, yes. But reflecting what I would consider genuine endearment. It's a nice story, the idea of… and Jeff made a point of telling me about this, how freaked out his brother's cats were. You said that you left his brother a phone message at one time, and it was scary how much that brother sounded like Jeff?
Matt: Oh, it sounded, for half a second I'm like, is Jeff messing with me? I'm like, no, that's right. No, that because Jeff had said that the two of them, because they're identical, they look alike, but they even sound kind of alike. Although I think his brother has a further southern twang over the one that Jeff had…
Dave: Right.
Matt: Which anybody that's watched the Cerebus movie and heard Elrod, that's Jeff!
Dave: Yes. Yes. I think his brother was always in the South. I can't remember if he was in in Texas or Arkansas, but wherever he was, it was about as South as you could get.
Matt: I thought he was in Minneapolis for a little bit before Jeff went there, but I could be wrong.
Dave: M’kay. All right, moving on! “And then the boys in the band want to know,” hi guys and Margaret and this is Birdsong being the uh, “Damn It Birdsong” being the spokes guy here. “ I was going to just send this to Matt, but I'm still not sure about something. Margaret, your website lists “Psycho” annual #1 (1972) as having a contents page illustration by Dave. I found a copy on archive.com and when I first saw it I said no effing way did Dave do that at 18? But the more I stare at it and ignore the gray tones and just focus on the drawing underneath, the more it begins to look like maybe it is an 18 year old Dave. Or am I blowing sunshine up my own skirt?”, inquires Birdsong. And, uh yeah, I understand that that's actually illegal on the internet now, that, yes you are just blowing sunshine up your own skirt. Uh, no, the the picture, that's done by Pablo Marcos, who did a lot of work for Skywald and after Skywald folded he had an even more extensive career inking at Marvel, I think. He was one of the few of the Spanish guys who could do a sort of plausible Neal Adams. Most of the Spanish agency guys look more like Esteban Maroto. Birdsong is right that there's there's no way I could have done that at age 18, but it brings up the interesting thought that I thought I was at least as good as Pablo Marcos at the time, which I think is what endears us to God. We're stupid and we have no idea how stupid we are. I think God is more interested in the process of the issue, in this case me. In us learning to perceive more accurately and as accurately as possible, God being omniscient, knowing what limitations are on those for us, as individual. At age 18, I'm only this talented, which is nowhere near as talented as I want to be, nowhere near as talented as I think I am, but I can get better if I work at it, which I did. That's really what I chose to do with my life. The Greek term for God's love, I never know how to pronounce it because I've never heard anybody pronounce it, it's spelled like agape, uh-goppa? I think it’s uh-goppa, or uh-goppy? Anyway, it takes endearment to a whole new level of the concept being a quality of preciousness. Love to the level of “this is a really precious thing to to me personally”, in this case the me personally being God, and that quality I see as being an implication of omniscience and not having no quality of patronization or condescension. God doesn't look at us as cat videos, I don't think, although most of the time he would be very justified in thinking, “This is like a really bad cat video.” So, yes, that's my answer on that one is, no, I did not do the content page illustration in “Psycho” annual #1. Margaret almost never gets anything wrong, so when she does we all get to gloat shamelessly.
Matt: So do you have any material in “Psycho” annual #1 that you know of?
Dave: No, nope, the only thing that I had actually published by in Skywald was in, I believe it was the last issue of “Psycho”, which was I think the winter special, and that was just a script. That was “Cry of the White Wolf”, was in that one.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: So, yeah, it would be interesting finding out from Margaret where she found this out, who she heard this from. I forgot today to check my “Overstreet Guide” to see if they got it wrong, because when “Overstreet” gets something wrong, that spreads like wildfire, then you might as well just accept the fact, “Well, yeah, I did the contents page in “Psycho” annual #1 (1972)”. There's no arguing with “Overstreet”.
Matt: At that point, can you just put that illustration in your portfolio and try to get work?
Dave: [laughs] There you go, and just hope that Pablo Marcos doesn't find out about it!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Uh, where are we? Okay, so there's the illustration, so we’re past that page. There's the edited one, so we're past that page, and then MJ Sewall! Mike Sewall. Nice to hear from you again, Mike. Hope you're still writing, hope you're working on your next book. Feel incredibly guilty now if you aren't, or haven't been for the last while, because you've definitely got to get your next collection of short stories out, says Dave Sim.” Hey Manly Matt, A question for Dave, for PHFDS: In all my reading you almost always call yourself a cartoonist. Why do you call yourself a cartoonist and not an artist? Thanks! M J (Mike) Sewall.” Uh, okay. I agree with you, I do say that when asked or when writing about myself. I come from a time when a cartoonist was how you describe somebody who wrote and drew comics. I think that got carved in stone with the Kirby Awards and then the Eisner Awards and then the Harvey Awards, that “best cartoonist” meant best guy who wrote and drew his own material both, as opposed to “best artist” or “best penciller” or “best inker”. An artist just makes the pictures, as opposed to writing words, when you're talking about an artist in the comic book field. In other words, if it has words on it, you aren't an artist in most people's minds, that's in the general societal sense. You know, a painting is art, but all exceptions duly noted, paintings don't have words on them. Art with words is considered a lesser, lowbrow art by the general public. That could be changing as well, and that'll be my qualifier throughout my answer is, you're talking about somebody who still back in the 20th century. How I mean cartoonist when I say I'm a cartoonist, is as an all-encompassing catch-all term for all forms of comics and cartoon art. The category is broad enough, cartoonist, that it includes animators, storyboard artists, magazine cartoonists, editorial cartoonists, the guy who draws Daffy Duck comics is a cartoonist, and the guy who drew “Heart of Juliet Jones” is a cartoonist in that context. The sort of the widest spanning umbrella. I'm a cartoonist in the same sense that a hockey player is an athlete, so that's the answer. In terms of what you're asking me, Mike, that's why I would say cartoonist because when I'm answering the question or I'm defining myself, first of all to people in the comics field, people that are familiar with the comics field, and then defining myself also to people who aren't in the comics field, the most accurate term for what I do is cartoonist. But okay, so to qualify that, I would say we need to attack the other list, which is why other things besides cartoonists aren't the answer. If you stray away from the blanket term cartoonist, you get into accuracy trouble. As an example, the term illustrator implies a greater level of precision to professional rendering than does cartoonist. The curse of “Peanuts” thing. Jack Kirby was a cartoonist, Stan Drake was an illustrator. Let me put it this way, on “Cerebus” I was a cartoonist, rising to the level of illustrator what it was called for. Obvious examples with the photorealism stuff that I did in “Latter Days”. Jaka particularly in the end of “Form & Void”, at the end of “Going Home”, that was my best attempt to draw an actual female as I pictured her in my head having known her as a fictional creation for that long. That was far more precise a rendering than anything that would qualify as cartooning. So me rising to the level of illustrator when it was called for, but mostly cartooning. So if I'm being accurate about describing myself, it's still safer to say cartoonist than artist, because you know I'm not a fine artist, and I was infrequently an illustrator on “Cerebus”. On Strange Death of Alex Raymond, I was an illustrator. So that covers the why I wouldn't use a term that didn't broadly cover both of those categories to people in the comic field, and to people in the quote-unquote “real world”. I don't describe myself as a graphic novelist, because to me graphic novelists sounds both pretentious and pejorative. Mostly in the real world environment. It has slightly different meaning in the comic book field itself, but in terms of your average person, if I was to say “I'm a graphic novelist. That's what I do” as soon as you get over in the real world, usually a graphic novel has graphic violence, just for the sake of the violence, like “Dark Knight Returns” or “The Killing Joke”. Made up violence to generate, [laughs] how would you even describe that?To generate cathartic revulsion in people who find the experience of cathartic revulsion entertaining. That’s apart from the accident itself, that isn’t an apt description of the Strange Death of Alex Raymond. Now the part that Carson did, Jack Van Dyke wincing at the “ears torn off his head” cover is alluding to that. She's reading a graphic novel, she's a comic store manager, so she's expects it to have gross out violence in it. But the only violence in Strange Death of Alex Raymond is, this is how this comics illustrator died, which if you call the graphic novel the Strange Death of Alex Raymond, that's what you're addressing. But even there, it's a very, the actual accident, what's happened in the accident, which you know I am getting to, will be a part of the overall graphic novel. In terms of page count, it's definitely not the the center of Strange Death of Alex Raymond. That then sets into, okay, we're here in 2022, Grandpa is still back in the 20th century sometime, but everybody else, everyone within the sound of my voice is in 2022. So in that, how would you sum it up? The all-electric all-online world everyone else lives in, all of these definitions are I'm sure or I would imagine or experience tells me are changing. I'm not on the internet, so I don't get swept up in the, “This is what we call this thing now” that, from my reading about the internet, seems to be the center of the internet. “This is what we call this thing now.” We didn't used to do that as a society for most things. I'm not aware of the new definitions, because as I say, my definitions come from the ancient all physical world of the 20th century, now dead and buried and unmourned by those people. What people online agree to call something, is what it is today. So I call myself a cartoonist for all of these 20th century reasons, I have no idea where the rapidly mutating and spinning out of control all-electric all-online world is using for the basis of its definitions. Let me cite the example of floppy. That's, to me, internet people inventing an insulting term for something that they want to insult, which, from outside the construct is outside of the internet, this is where Grandpa is, seems to me the inner circle of the internet within the inner circle of the internet. “We have to have accurate descriptions of everything, so we know what to hate and what to insult.” The culture wars are, I noted this, where’s my note here? There. The culture wars are red state people figuring out what to hate and what to insult in the blue state world, and blue state people figuring out what to hate and what to insult in the red state world. Again, the world I came from, and that I perceive myself as still being a part of, we agreed that there was one world with specific properties. That's gone now, I think. Oscar Levesque, I wrote here, was way ahead of the curve when he came up with Twin Earths. So, you're an internet person. Like, I don't know how much of your life you spend on the internet, but…
Matt: Too much according to my wife!
Dave: What's that?
Matt: Too much according to my wife. [laughs]
Dave: Okay, more than her, in other words?
Matt: No, she lives on her iPhone, but it's, you know, I spend hours crafting a blog post and she'll spend hours just randomly looking at things, but they're not equivalent in her mind, and I'm kind of like, okay, but yes I spend too long doing this stupid blog, but at the same time it keeps me off the streets! I mean, it’s a relatively…
Dave: Right! And it’s also there… go ahead.
Matt: It's a relatively harmless hobby. I mean, very rarely does it rise to the level of anything anybody's gonna get really mad about.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: I mean, the problem with the internet is that it's very much the sociological experiment with the mice, where they trained the mice to press the button to get the food pellet. First, it was the Pavlov thing of, okay, we ring the bell and then you get a food pellet, now it's a, okay, you gotta go push this button, you'll get a food pellet. Well they used that research to build social media. It's not a, “okay, I'm gonna look at one more post and then I'm gonna be done”, it's, “I'm gonna look at one more post and then I'm gonna find another post, and another post, and another…” you know? It's built in, they understand the psychology of humans, and it's, “I want another one, I want another one, I want another one!” Well that's great, but you're getting a fat head!
Dave: Right.
Matt: And it's eating empty calories mentally.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I mean, it's a great way to spend 10 minutes, but when you're spending hours just looking at videos or looking at pictures of, I mean the one i can't understand that I'll never understand because I'm just old enough that it makes no sense to me is, why are we taking pictures of our food before we eat it and posting it on the internet so everybody can see our meals?
Dave: [laughs] Right. Uh, I would suspect that that is whatever is the the most heightened pleasure response in a human being, they are going to want to take a picture of that, and put it online. Because when you're in the restaurant and your food arrives, that's probably the happiest you're going to be. Inside of an hour you're going to have indigestion and that's not nearly as much fun as being hungry and looking at something that's way too expensive and a seductive temptation.
Matt: Well it's even boiled over to, my friend's wife makes dinner and posts pictures of “this is the meal I made.” I'm like, okay, on the one hand, yes, you're proud that you made dinner, but on the other hand, nobody cares! It's not like you're giving us the recipe…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: …you're just saying “I made food”. Well, congratulations, you're a self-sufficient human!
Dave: Well, she cares, obviously, and it wouldn't be a meal until she took a picture of it and posted it.
Matt: I guess!
Dave: It is, to me, the scary side of television that finally compelled me to get rid of my television. “It's time to admit what this is in your life, Dave.” Steve Bissette gave me a book called “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”, and you know, having read the book and gone, yeah, can't argue with any of that, I still had a television. In any other category, that's a junkie.
Matt: [laughs] Well, I mean, it's just it's one of those… the internet, it's a wonderful tool that we turned into… it's not even an advertisement anymore, because what social media sells is your eyes looking at whatever it is somebody pays to put in front of you, and knowing that, it's like, you know I don't care about… I mean, I deleted the Facebook off my phone today, because I'm spending time on Facebook clicking the button to make the ad go away, because I don't care, I don't want to see it, and a week later, it's the same ad popping up again, and it's like they're training me to fight them but at the same time the only way to win is to not play.
Dave: Right. Right. Which is, you could say the same thing about the casino. It's like, if you're stupid enough to go into a casino, and you don't own the casino, ahh, you're just asking for trouble.
Matt: Well but my friend is, I forget what percentage Native American or Indian or indigenous people, whatever the politically correct term is, but he worked at the Indian casino, and if you ran into him he's like, “Oh hey, thanks for coming by and paying my paycheck!” It was no bones about it, oh yeah, he's glad to see you because you're going to lose money!
Dave: Right.
Matt: And, I don't know, it's just… I mean, getting back to Mike's question about why you call yourself a cartoonist, is that, well, you're an artist but the art you picked was cartooning. If you'd been a painter, you would call yourself a painter. If you'd been a musician, you would have been whatever musician you would have been. I mean, I can see why saying cartoonist… I mean, on the one hand, well cartooning is this red-headed bastard stepchild of the arts, but at the same time, no, it isn't! [laughs] It is an art form unto itself. And like, the animator thing. I mean, it still blows my mind, like it was only a few years ago I discovered that Salvador Dali and Walt Disney teamed up to make a cartoon back in the 40s, and it got shelved, and like a few years ago somebody at Disney went, “Wait, we have a Slavador Dali co-produced cartoon and we never finished it?” and it was like, “Oh well, yeah, no, it was gonna be part of ‘Fantasia’ and then it got shelved” and they went back and found his notes and finished the cartoon, and you can watch it, and it's like a seven minute surreal fantasy, and every time I watch it, I'm like, this shouldn't exist! This is the part where my brain goes, “Salvador Dali would never have made a cartoon with Disney” and it's like, no, he totally would have made a cartoon with Disney!
Dave: [laughs] Right.Right.
Matt: The only part that I can't believe, is that it's a standalone, somewhat serious, adult kind of thing, and in the back of my head, a little voice is going, “You know, Dali kept going, ‘Can we put Mickey in it? Can we put Mickey in it? Can we put Mickey in it?’”
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah
Matt: “I want to put Donald in it, and have Donald get surreal!” And, it's, “No, we're not going to use the the cartoons. This is high art, Salvador. We're doing high art.” It's like, “No, we're not, we're doing a cartoon!”
Dave: That's right! That's right. It would be interesting to find out what Dali actually thought, as opposed to what he was saying, when he got himself mixed up in this.
Matt: i mean, it-- it--
Dave: Like one of those, “At some point, I have to do something like this. I can't walk away from this because this meshes with some interior quality that I've got that say this is what integrity is, is that you do something like this when you're presented the opportunity.” Or, if it was, “Uh no, I've got a lot of integrity. but I really got to find some way to expand beyond the parameters that I've gotten myself boxed into.” Which is one of those things every artist or every cartoonist, you're going to arrive at that point where you go, “Why is my career this narrowly confined?” and it's like, well, because you made a specific set of decisions. It was always zero or one. Sometimes you picked zero, sometimes you picked one, and this is the little narrow box you ended up in. There's any number of little narrow boxes you could have ended up in.
Okay, then we've got Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania. It just wouldn't be Please Hold for Dave Sim without Michael R showing up for a visit. “Hi Matt!I hope you're enjoying your summer. (Side Note --- I "Paid it Forward" to Ben Hobbs on Cerebus In Hell?: Hardcovers 11 & 12 for Series 6 Trading Cards to a deserving Cerebus fan of Ben's choice. I hope this reduces my sentence with you.” So he owes you brownie points, does he?
Matt: He doesn't owe me anything. We had an awkward confrontation because he sent money trying to buy signed Jeff Seiler cards.
Dave: Oh! Right, right, right. This brings us back to our last get together. Keep going.
Matt: And I, I think rightly, was that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works, and sent him his money back, and sent him a signed card, like, okay, here's one card, but like he was trying to buy four of them, and I'm like, why? And he explained, it was a set for him and set to go to somebody else, and I'm like, but that's not the point. The whole point here is we're remembering Jeff. Anyone that knows Jeff can get a card. Anyone that's got a Jeff story, you get a signed card. That's, trying to get more Jeff stories coming in, because eventually you and I are gonna be like, “Hey, remember that time that Jeff did that thing?” and the other guy’s gonna go, “Yeah, wasn’t that great?” And then we’re gonna move on.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I mean, we're not gonna have an infinite supply of Jeff stories. At some point it's going to be, “Didn't we already talk about the time he did that thing?” So it's not that I'm mad at Michael, it was just, I was trying to be delicate without… being firm yet delicate without, you know, saying, “Hey, never darken my doorway again!” It's just a, okay, this wasn't what the intention was, and I didn't think people were gonna go, “Oh hey, I want to buy one of those.” Like, well yeah, but they're not for sale. That's the whole point.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I mean, I didn't…
Dave: Which, again, you know, approval is an authoritarian concept. You can try and make yourself the arbitrator of that, but what you say “this is what we're doing” and what you say “this is what this is”. When that hits Michael R's radar screen, it goes to a completely different place on his radar, that goes to, “I need four of these.”
Matt: And that's, you know, it's one of those, if anybody's got a story and they wanna send me an email, I'll give you my address. Mail me a self-addressed stamped envelope, and I'll mail you a card back. It's a fairly simple offer, but of course you know, like everything else in the 21st century, let's make it as complicated as we can, cause why not?
Dave: Right! Right. And you only get three responses, and two of them are completely messing up your entire intent from the get-go.
Okay, moving on to Michael's question, “Hi Dave! I LOVED all the "Matisse and Snow" original art cards. I keep looking at update #20 that Birdsong had on Cerebus No 4 6-7/78 & POT8.2 with all the cards that you created. Any chance reproducing all of them and put them in a set for the next big Kickstarter? All the best, Dave.” Um, boy, I gotta tell you, I've said this before about Michael R, people are really going to think that Michael R is just this Please Hold for Dave Sim audience plant, because now that I've finally finished the third “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” #8 cover, uh have you put that up yet?
Matt: Yes!
Dave: Okay. All right. I'm announcing the ginormous TMNT 8 Kickstarter in January will be done by Waverly Press, which I will be faxing Dagon about, so Michael R, I’m going to be faxing Dagon on Saturday, so you're going to be finding out the same time that Dagon is! How cool is that? Dagon already ordered “Pieces of Turtles 8” and “Pieces of Turtles 8.2” for himself personally, so he has those as raw materials for whatever he's gonna put together, picking and choosing what he wants to use and doesn't want to use. I mean, you know as with my TMNT covers, I make suggestions to Dagon, and that's really what it is. Here's what seems like a good idea to me, but Dagon puts a lot of time and energy into his Kickstarters, and he's the rainmaker when it comes to bringing in money. So I'm really only comfortable giving him suggestions, so I imagine he will use all three of my Turtles Eight covers. I'm suggesting four, since I'd like to have a black and white variant of the cover where I adapted one of Kevin and Peter's interior panels, you know which one I'm talking about.
Matt: Right.
D : The actual cover recreation, the one that I got a blue line gun of Kevin's wraparound cover and then inked it in my own style, I'm happy to just let David Birdsong go to town on that one, but getting to your actual question, Michael, Rolly will be emailing Dagon high-rez scans of the Matisse cards next week. So same deal, Dagon can use one of the cards, or all of them, or none of them. I agree with you! I think it would make a cool set. While I was doing them, I was, as the Brits say reat chuffed to see how good the cards looked when I enlarged them 200% to fax them to David Birdsong to keep as much detail as possible in the fax. So that's another suggestion I would make to Dagon, hey, why don't you do the Matisse cards, but do them twice the size of the original. Um, what was the other thing I was gonna…? I was, oh! Uh, I’m hoping Kevin Eastman will open up his secret TMNT 8 file, which I didn't know existed until I had a nice chat with Kevin about a month ago. And I'm hoping he will, he said he was going to mail me copies of everything in his TMNT 8 file, and some of it was pretty interesting. I don't think he mailed it to me, so if he did and it got lost in the mail somewhere, I think it's just one of those good intentions things. Kevin intended to do that. He's just turned 60 years old, [laughs] you’re in your 60s, your good intentions have a way of just going the way of all flesh.
Matt: Well, if he--
Dave: I hope… go ahead!
Matt: If he did San Diego, which, I don't know if he was there or not, but I mean, San Diego Comic-Con was, what, two weeks ago? Three weeks ago? So it could be that, you know, he was, “Okay, I'm gonna go out, do the convention. When I get back, then I will scan everything or copy everything and get it in a box” or it could have been a case if he opened up the file drawer and went, “Uh-oh, this is a lot more than I remembered.”
Dave: Or could be both. Could be both. Yes, Kevin's doing, I think he said something like 75% of his income is from doing shows. And like he says, just show up and be Kevin Eastman and meet everybody, and do little Turtle heads, and sign them. So it was interesting talking to him about it. There was, he was talking about stuff that was going to be in the book and didn't make the cut, like I was picturing that this comic book mushroomed to 45 pages long, and that was just the size that it got to. No, he was even more enthusiastic than that, so that he had to cut it back to 45 pages! Evidently, there were Bob and Doug McKenzie characters that were supposed to be in Turtles Eight, I forget what their names were, and there was another obvious Canadian reference character that was supposed to be in there, and I'm in my mid 60s, that went in in one ear and out the other. But it's like Kevin said, he's got this file that's got all of this stuff in it. Everything that he put down on paper about Turtles Eight from the time that I said, yeah, let's do it! By all means, send me a script and Bob's your uncle kind of thing.”
So that leads me to my phone message that I left for Kevin, which I actually wrote. How many people actually write their phone messages, and then sort of tweak the humour? And it’s, Kevin has this thing where when he leaves a message for me, he goes, “Mr. Sim” and then there's a pause, and he goes, “It's Mr. Eastman.” So this is now our ongoing thing where I go, [Groucho impression] “Mr. Eastman, it's Mr. Sim! Just calling to thank you for the giant pile of money I'm about to receive from ‘Pieces of Turtles 8.2’ Kickstarter. Most of it at your expense. I literally couldn't have done it without you, Kevin. Twenty-something thousand dollars is a giant pile of money to me, I freely confess. Your results may vary. I just finished my third and final Turtles Eight cover, so I'll be announcing on Please Hold for Dave Sim, August 6, that Waverly Press will be handling the ginormous Turtles Eight Kickstarter in January. Why let me have all the fun? With Waverly Press’ capable assistance, you can shamelessly exploit yourself, Kevin, and your secret trove of Turtles Eight memorabilia. I'm gonna give Dagon James your cell phone number, because if I don't, how else could he contact you? Telepathy? I don't know why I said that, it just popped into my head. Anyway, let's leave no stone unturned, neither Mick or Keith nor Ronnie, in pursuit of the ill-gotten booty which you and Peter and myself are entitled at the expense of our decades-younger less-wrinkly selves. Hope you are the same, Dave.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: So I left that, mhm, a week and a half ago? And as I say, on Saturday, when people are presumably listening to this for the first time, I'm gonna write Kevin's cell phone number on that little script there, and fax it to Dagon James and that's when he will know, he's the guy. The clock is ticking. Five months from now, we've got to have, as promised, a ginormous “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” 8 Kickstarter. Grandpa's last payday [laughs] is the way that I look at it.
Matt: Gonna stock up on the expensive cat food while you still can!
Dave: That's right! That's right, before all the cats get it.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: It's like, I don't like to be patronizing and condescending, but if it comes down to who gets the good cat food and who doesn't, uh, sorry, kitties, Grandpa's gotta pull rank here.
Matt: So somebody called and… or, not called, somebody emailed and was asking if I had any more copies of “Pieces of Turtles 8.1”, and I'm like, no, but I can look into it. I mean, you know, you looking for an official” I want the bells and whistles for CGC” type deal, or do you just want the contents and he's like, “Oh, I just want the contents.” I'm like, well, let me look into things, and I'll come back to you. And I emailed Josh Even going, “Hey, was anybody seriously gonna take Dave up on his offer, or does it sound like everybody pretty much passed?” He said, “Well, there was one guy that was gung-ho. He was gonna do it, but I haven't heard anything in a while.” And I'm like thinking about it, I'm like… I could come up with a cover! And yeah, I mean, it's not gonna be the greatest cover, but if you're only buying the inside of the book, it doesn't matter what we slap on the outside. So no matter what crap I do, it would still be, you know, okay, ignore the cover, just read the interior. And then I thought about it and I came up with like five or six fairly funny ideas. One of them, it's a strip where it's a Turtle and Cerebus around a campfire eating something that they killed, and are eating and Cerebus says, “So, there's only four of you in existence?” and the Turtle's like, “Yep” and Cerebus goes, “Then why the masks?” and it's like six panels of just the Turtle's face, and at the very last panel he's got a panicked look on his face, and he goes, “Oh God, I've wasted my life!”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I'm like, that's kind of funny, but it's not really a cover. That'd be like a back cover. And finally, like a bolt of lightning it hit me. Well, you know, there's Matisse which is Cerebus mashed into the Turtles, who would Matisse fight? And the answer is Cirin mashed with the Shredder, and I mentally got this image of Cirin with the Shredder armor, confronting Matisse, which is Cerebus as a Turtle, and I'm like okay, what's the dialogue? And it's, “Prepare to face the wrath of big mama Shredder!” and Matisse is either saying or thinking, and I can't decide which one is funnier, but it's either a thought balloon or a word balloon and it's, “Funny, that's what Matisse calls his dick!”
Dave: [laughs] Okay… um… I think….
Matt: So as…
Dave: [clears throat] Go ahead. I interrupted there.
Matt: As the guy who can say, “Matt, no” feel free to say “Matt, no” and I'll just file it away as a, that was a funny idea but you know we'll let it go, or “Okay, go ahead!”
Dave: I would say you'd better contact Dagon about that. I mean, this is one of the big pluses for me in not being the guy doing the ginormous “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” #8 Kickstarter, is that I'm not the one who's going to arbitrate… and how are you going to arbitrate? It's one of those, the rock and the hard place is the rock is the number of people who went, “This Spawn 10 was the absolute coolest Kickstarter. I can't believe I've got all of these great covers” and the “If they ever do this again with this many covers, Imma kill somebody!”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And it’s like, that is one of the things that I am happy to hand off, and I have to say, one of the things that I admire about Dagon is that when he makes up his mind about something, he's made up his mind about something. And it really doesn't doesn't matter to him what you think about him, or if you will never ever buy anything ever ever ever from Waverly Press ever ever ever again, you know, that's fine. And the between that rock and the hard place, when you start squeezing those two together, the thing that pops up is Dagon going, “What is the absolute coolest thing that that I can sell here? Who can I get to do a cover that we can make it a stretch goal or something like that? They don't even find out about it for the first week or the first week and a half or whatever, and then, ‘Oh my God, that is so cool! I have to have one of those!’” I mean, we already sort of went through this with the collection with Josh, that was Josh's collection. Well, not completely his collection. He's got some in there that weren't his, right?
Matt: Yeah, there were a couple that the Dragnet caught them, and I was just putting… you know, it was all in one file, and I moved it to a separate file of, okay it's Turtles, it's Cerebus, it all goes together. And then I found out afterward it was, yeah, but some of this Josh doesn't own, and I'm like, that involved more research than I was willing to do. So…
Dave: Right. Right. Now that's off of your desk, and off of my desk, and on to Dagon's desk. I suspect Dagon is going to get his own covers done, just because that's the kind of guy that Dragon is. I think he already had had carson working on one.
Matt: I don't know if that was for Josh, or if that was for Dagon. Carson did the one where it's Cerebus on a skateboard going across and wiping out, and the Turtles are in the background initially cheering him on, and as it progresses, they're doing the face palm because he's so bad at what he's doing.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And if I remember right, it's there’s the original, and then I think there's a colored version where it's supposed to look like the Turtles video game.
Dave: Mm! Okay. All right.
Matt: You have both of--
Dave: Like I say, this is, I’m just glad that this is off of my desk, so I'm not the one having to decide this. It would be interesting to have people in the comments section saying, “This many variant covers and no more.”
Matt: There's going to be people of, “I want everything.” There's going to be people going, “You guys should just limit this to half a cover. Like do a cover, rip half of it off, and that's it because there's too many damn covers in the world.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: My thing was if I do my cover, and I do a printing, it would be like going through Alfonso, and you know the original deal of paying Alfonso, paying Rolly, kicking some money to you. Do like a run of 50, have them all signed, and okay, you know, there's 50 of them. When they're gone, they're gone. I'm never doing this again. It's a, you missed out on the initial. If you're a completeist, this isn't gonna be the best cover that could ever be produced. It's gonna hopefully look neat, but at the same time, I could completely whiff it and it could look like total dog crap.
Dave: Right, right. And again, the more that I listen to this, the more I go, I'm glad this isn't my choice, because like you say, it really does need to be authorized by somebody. We can't just say, okay free for all, anybody that wants to do one, go ahead.
Matt: Well, if Dagon's gonna reprint the material from 8.1, that makes me doing one completely superfluous and unnecessary, and having officially been known as kind of a lazy guy… [laughs] you know, the best solution to any crisis like this is, oh I don't have to do anything? Well, that's what I'm gonna go with!
Dave: Right. Right. Um, yeah, that's one of those, as soon as you add a time span to that situation, then you're in a different situation, because you can say, “If Dagon does another version of the 8.1, no one will ever need one after that.” It's like, no, that doesn't work. It's the same as… I said probably up through the 1990s if not into the 2000s, “Turtles #8 will never be worth anything because there's 70,000 of them.” That doesn't work it's, no, eventually you come to a point where no matter what, somebody will discover something for the first time, and go, “I had no idea that this existed. How can I get one of these?” I mean same thing with three different versions of the Guide to Self-Publishing, and you still get people going, “You know, I've been looking for this all over the internet. How can I get one of these kinds of things?” It's the curse of being the supplier, and all supplies are finite.
Matt: Yeah, that’s, it’s one of those where it’s, there has to be enough of whatever in the world and you find out that eventually somebody's gonna be like, “I didn't know!” I mean, the email I got was, “Oh hey, I was wondering if there's any left?” That's like, there hasn't been any since the week after I got them!
Dave: [laughs] Yes.
Matt: But, you know, it's one of those, I will look into it because I know that there might be a guy doing a copy, otherwise it's, okay, I guess I can work on this in my free time, my “haha” free time.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I have made a mock-up of a cover. The intention is when I get the mock up to where I think it's all right, I'm gonna go to the copy shop and see if they can do non-reproducible blue illustration, you know, print out non-reproducible blue, 11 by 17 originals. And then I will knuckle down and teach myself to ink, type deal, and make it look as good as the “Glamourpuss” ad I did for Jeff Seiler in “Cerebus Readers in Crisis” #4.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: It's Dave's art, but I'm tracing the crap out of it!
Dave: See, there's also the situation of Kevin, when I was talking to him on the phone, said, “Yeah, I'm still in touch with Peter. Peter and I, we're not as close as we were, but we're still in contact” and I said, if I send you an extra copy of 8.2, can you can you forward it to Peter? And he said sure. So presumably Peter's gotten a copy of 8.2. What if they see your cover, and Kevin and Peter go, “We have to do this.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Then you're talking about a whole different category.
Matt: At that point that's when I, as the humble little schmuck that I am, go, okay, bye. [laughs] You guys can do whatever you want with this idea!
Dave: [laughs] Right! Which is good! Which is good. We're always going to keep that as open as an option. Anybody comes up with an idea for a Turtles 8 cover between now and, let's say, October, this is another element that I'm making the suggestion… actually Dagon made the original suggestion. The more I think of it, the more I think that Dagon's right about this. Printing everything ahead of time so that as soon as the Kickstarter ends, then you start shipping the stuff after that, and he can sell whatever the leftover copies on CerebusOverload. Anybody coming up with an idea, uh, who knows? You know, stranger things have happened than Kevin, or Peter, or Kevin and Peter going, “That's really cool. I wanna do that” and I'm sure that Dagon will have his ear to the ground throughout the entire process.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Which brings us to, I think this is our our last question. I decided to include Christon but not to include Eduardo. When I looked at Eduardo's response on whatever the Portuguese Brazil Cerebus publication trade paperback whatever it is, is going to be. There's just too many questions with no short answers.
Matt: That’s one of the reasons…
Dave: So, Eduardo, I will be getting back to you, but I'll be getting back to you in in text form by relay fax.
Matt: That's, when I was gonna send that up and Christon's up and I'm like… I was gonna do, I think I got I had them, and I was gonna do it on Monday and I just got busy. And then it was, I'm getting the fax ready I'm going, well, there’s these two, but at the same time, I probably shouldn't and that's why I’m like, nope! I'll just throw them on as, “Uh hey, if you really want to, we can, and if you don't want to, I totally understand.”
Dave: Right. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. So let me sift through my faxes, “Hey matt it's, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, “Christon Hunwardsen. Towards the bottom of today's AMoC blog, there was a Cerebus sketch cover drawing done by Dave and a letter faxed uploaded asking if he'd be interested in doing that particular sketch for a commission. He had blacked out all my information, name, address, which I appreciate. But that was in fact me! And seeing as he did that colored sketch and added my name, Christon, on the bottom left of the cover. I take it that he is in fact interested. Sweet! I'd love to own it. I still have my money that I was intending on pledging on our ‘Cerebus’ #4 art auction on Heritage.” And thank you for participating in that, Christon. “Does he have a payment preference? Cashier check to Aardvark-Vanaheim Incorporated?” Uh, yes, that would be my preferred form of payment, which is going to lead into, if anybody else wants to play the home version of our game, here's how it's done. “Does he accept PayPal?” Not from the U.S., because we're really only set up for Canadian dollar payments at the PayPal on CerebusDownloads.com, and my agreement with Gerhard is that he gets 25% of everything that comes in on CerebusDownloads.com, and so I prefer not to have $1000 commissions with $250 going to Gerhard when he didn't do anything on it. And I don't think Gerhard would expect that. “Card?” No, no credit cards.
Matt: We covered that one!
Dave: Yeah, the fees were just getting out of hand, and I suspended Aardvark-Vanaheim's Visa and Mastercard accounts, and have never had cause to regret it over the years. “And also it doesn't say it direct but is he asking for $2000 for the art cover? It's beautiful, but I do want to be on the same page. If you wouldn't mind assisting on this, I'd appreciate it. Thank you, Christon.” And yes, thank you, Matt. Uh, hello, Christon. Rolly mailed you the Cerebus the sketchbook. So for the moment, [laughs] let's leave it at that. Wait until the sketchbook comes in, and then when it comes, or it might be an “if”, you know, if it comes in. This whole thing seemed really really smooth and beneficial with absolutely no downside and that always gets me suspicious [laughs] because it means, okay, I'm getting set up for a custard pie in the face here, but what the heck. I'll play along and this is… the potential custard pie I see in this one is Christon pays me for the cover, and then the cover never actually ever gets to him. So if Christon can keep us posted on that, there was… but yeah, you know, wait until you actually see it. I would be very happy with $2000. The original is very different from a scan of the original, if you see it and it's that much better than you thought it was going to be, yes, I'd be tickled to death with $2000, but I'll leave that up to you. You said like a thousand or more than a thousand, so that's why I was, again, leaving that up to you, because this was a complete serendipity kind of situation of, it really couldn't have come together, and I'll explain this in a moment. It couldn't have come together in a more unlikely or serendipitous kind of way. It seems like a Comic Art Metaphysics kind of thing, because it was, first of all, your letter was the only piece of mail that came in that week that wasn't a bill or just you know a request from a charity or something like that, that I had to deal with on that level. And it came in the day after I finished the painted Turtles 8 cover, where I probably learned more about watercolour painting that I have learned from the watercolours that I've done over the last 30, 40 years, and going, that's pretty interesting. I had no idea that there was that much obvious stuff that I didn't know about watercolours and that I now do know about watercolours. So it seemed resonant that… I think I've told you the story before about Bill Sienkiewicz making the decision that he wanted to make his sketchbooks look more like his finished art and his finished art look more like his sketchbooks. And when I got the Turtles cover done, it had been a salvage job from about the middle out. I got it halfway done, and went, okay, I really have no idea if this can be saved or if I know how to save it, but I'm just gonna leave this hanging on the wall and look at it reasonably frequently until I'm pretty confident that I'm ready to tackle it again. And I actually did save it! It's like, that almost never happens. Usually you try to save something, and it's like, well, the best I can hope for is it doesn't suck as badly as it did at the halfway point, but it still sucks. It's like, mhmm, no, it actually didn't suck when I was done. And [laughs] one of the interesting things was, because I was learning more about watercolours than I had ever learned before over the last 30 years, the test sheet that I have, which is the same for testing the watercolours, same size, 11 by 17, as the cover itself. I looked at it and it had that Bill Sienkiewicz quality where I'm going, I want to make my watercolours look more like my test sheet and my test sheet look more like my finished painting. I was looking at the patches where I was mixing the colour of the clouds, and figuring out how to do the clouds, and going, this looks so much better on the test sheet and it does… And note to Margaret, I will be signing the test sheet and sending it to you, so you can scan it, and vouch for my claim. I might even circle the area that I'm talking about. And it was, yeah, if only the sky on the Turtles cover looked like the area where I was mixing the grey and the blue, that'd be really cool. So it's like, well okay, you did both! [laughs] It's not as if somebody else did the test sheet, this is your test sheet. You just weren't anguishing about the test sheet, but you were anguishing about the painting, which is probably where your problem is coming from. Don’t do that. Don't anguish about it. Just put the clouds on just as if you were testing the colour on a test sheet, instead of going, okay, here we go, everybody tense up, we're getting ready to do the clouds.
So, that had all come to the end the day before. Rolly picks up the mail, so I get the mail on Thursday unless he's downtown doing errands for somebody else, in which case he'll drop off the mail on Wednesday. But he got me the mail, and it's like I opened the letter, and it's got a MyComicShop copy of the sketchbook cover, in a plastic bag with a backing board. And it’s, “If I paid you a thousand dollars, would you be interested in doing something on this, and do you have kind of a counter offer?” You saw the the the thing that he sent. So I'm looking at it, Rolly gets here about between ten to nine, and quarter after nine, depending on what's going on on Thursday mornings. So it's quarter after nine, and I'm going [laughs], okay, my brain is still swirling with all of this watercolour information knowledge that I've developed theory, “Be like this, don't be the way that you've been for the last 30 years with watercolours.” Here I've got somebody willing to pay me at least a thousand dollars or something on his sketchbook cover. I know that watercolours can be done on the sketchbook cover, and all of my watercolours are still sitting out. I haven't put them away, because I just did it last night. So, what can I do between now and when Rolly is leaving? Which is usually a middle afternoon depending on how much time he spends over at Studio ComixPres, going over stuff with Alfonso. Can can I, in effect, get a Cerebus watercolour done in an hour, or an hour and a half, and still have the rest of the day to work on Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and confirm for myself, yes, this is the way you want to do watercolours, you don't want to do them the way that you've been doing them? And it was an interesting 10 or so minutes of going, “Well if you're gonna do it, you have to start doing it now! You can't sit and think about this, or the longer you think about it ,the more implausible, unlikely, unworkable it's going to turn out to be.” So I went, okay. Rip open the plastic bag, take out the sketchbook, put it on the drawing board, and do a quick Cerebus pencil sketch of Cerebus, and then just went down the checklist while I was doing it of, “Here's what you want to do, and here's the order that you want to do them in, in order to do a much better watercolour.” And I won't go down the checklist, because it's fairly expensive, and it's pretty esoteric, but sure enough! An hour and a half, an hour and 45 minutes later, I had it done. It was serendipitous as well, because I was experiencing severe money paranoia, which happens when I haven't gotten money in on anything for a while, and I'm still paying bills but the money's all going out, money isn't coming in. Baby Boomers particularly are completely phobic about that, “Something has to be done about this” and it's like, well, okay, that's going to relieve some of that stress, as well, if you can say, whatever else happened today, I made at least a thousand dollars U.S. in an hour and a half. The more of that that we can have around here, the happier a camper Grandpa is going to be. Which leads me to the circuitous route that I've been following to try and lead to the point, if anybody else wants to do that, if anybody else wants to send me a cheque or a money order made out to Aardvark-Vanaheim. It doesn't have to be a sketchbook. I've still got some sketchbooks here if you want it to be on the sketchbook, or if you just wanted that size, basically comic book cover size, and just go, “I want the next one of these that you have available” and I'm not going to say it has to be a thousand dollars. But I would say the fact that Christon said, “I was going to put a money order for a thousand dollars in here, but then I decided I didn't want to be that presumptuous about it.” His instincts were good! He probably should have just put the money order in there, so that we didn't have to talk about the rest of that. So anybody listening to this who goes, “Yeah, I would like that. I would like to send Dave something in the vicinity of a thousand dollars U.S. knowing that when I send that on, let's say, a Wednesday, he's gonna get it the following Thursday. He will do it when he gets it in because it'll be a Thursday, so he can start at nine o'clock in the morning working on it. He'll get it done, Rolly will wrap it up, and mail it, and theoretically, and pretty solid theory, two weeks later, you will have your finished Dave Sim Cerebus watercolour.
Matt: Okay! I will talk that one up to everybody of, hey, you can get this but, you know… and it's a cash in a barrel ideal, you know, there isn't going to be, we're not gonna bicker, we're not gonna haggle, it's, if you send the money, you'll get it. If you don't send the money, guess what you're gonna get?
Dave: Nothing! Nothing, and it would be proportional to whatever the money was. I have to say, Christon, like I say, this is completely serendipitous because if you would have just sent a letter saying, “Are you interested in doing commissions?” and that was it, then it would have been, uhh, not really, because I know then the next question is going to be, “How much do you charge for a commission?” And it's like, well, I don't really do commissions. So the more you offer, the more likely you would be able to attract my immediate attention, [laughs] and I can say, in these inflation-ravaged times, a thousand dollars U.S. is a thousand dollars U.S. and if you want to attract Dave Sim's attention, that's gonna do it. So, yeah, I leave it there as an offer. I don't know if this was just a one-time Comic Art Metaphysics, how many different things can you have stacked up in in one piece of art coming into existence, that had to happen in that exact sequence for it to happen? That's why I'm hoping that it wasn't an “all of these things happened perfectly in an immaculate sequence” and then it got lost in the mail. So it's a it's a custard pie in the face. Ha, ha, ha.
Matt: My friend Kelly is an artist, and like 20 years ago when I was hanging out with… it was weird. I wanted to date her, she didn't want to date me, but I was, you know, the nerdy guy that was just hanging around hoping that she would randomly change her mind. And she's like, “It's weird” and I'm like, “What?” and I'm thinking, oh okay, she's finally gonna see the light and be like, “Oh yeah, this guy.” “It's like, when you're around it's like you're my muse and I get more done!” and I'm like, that's cause we just sit around while you work and I goof around. I mean, it's, I'm not distracting you by hey, let's watch your movie! Hey, let's do this! And it’s that you say you had to work, I'm just here to keep you awake while you're working. And she had a piece that she sold, mailed out, gone. Postal service ate it. So she had to quick do a recreation of the piece, which she had copied, she had scans of, so, you know, she knew the general layout of what it was, but it was slightly different cause it's not a line for line recreation, it's a, “this was what that piece was, this is another version of it.” And then she did a second piece as just a quick sketchy type piece as a thank you, and mailed it out to the guy. And like six months later, got, “Oh yeah, the post office found this and delivered it to me. So here's some extra money” type thing.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So the post office does have a tendency to eat things, so I'm pulling for you Christon. I’m pulling for you, but we're all going to think good thoughts about that sketch cover getting into his hands.
Dave: Yes, and hopefully it's already there. I mean it has been almost a week. The same thing happened with, I think it was Steve Swenson, where I did a Cerebus and Yoda drunk on the town, and he wanted it in pencil, and the post office lost the first one. So I did a second one, and then, yes, it does tend to happen, but the first one does show up, but it shows up only when you've given up all possible hope of ever seeing it again. Which is why I think both Canada Post and the US Post Office have a rule that it's not considered lost until at least six weeks have gone by, and you have to have tracking for it that says, “Yes, we tracked it this far and we have no idea where it went after that.”
Matt: I love tracking, because Paula will order stuff off the internet and get the tracking number and she'll get updates of, “Okay, it's here. Okay, it's there.” And like, we ordered the kids’ school supplies, and they're you know 50 miles away. Okay, that makes sense, there's a hub 50 miles away. It's getting put on trucks. And then she got the message, “They're in Chicago” and she's like, “No, that's backwards. It doesn't come close and then go far…”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And it was, yeah, no, this particular package, which was, “It'll be here tomorrow” was, “No, it'll be here at the end of the week.” It's like, apparently, somebody put it on the wrong truck or something.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I mean, we're all humans. Some people don't understand that, “Hey, this palette is for this place, not that place”, but at the same time, it's funny to watch, cause it's like the the Norway cards that Dagon sent you. How do you send something from America through Norway to Canada?
Dave: Well, it does happen, we know that it does happen. Everybody gets a turn. Okay, I think, as wildly improbable as it may seem, I think we brought that in at an hour and a half.
Matt: The last question I know that was on the list that might have gotten lost was, I think Dan Eckhart was the guy that asked, so with the reduced print run for “The Last Day” is there still going to be a Waverly Press edition, or is that going by the wayside with reduced print runs?
Dave: Ahh, I would say there's either going to be a Waverly Press edition, or there will be something obsessive compulsive disorder matching the Waverly Press edition so that it it looks like it belongs with the other hardcovers. Alfonzo has talked about, he's wanted to get into hardcovers for a while, so this is one of those, I still haven't broken it to him that I'm pretty sure he's going to be printing everything for us from now on. So it would certainly streamline things if Alfonso was able to do Waverly Press hardcovers for Waverly Press because Dagon actually does a fair amount of business through Alfonzo now, and realizes that Alfonso knows what he's doing. So it's not as if suddenly telling Dagon, “Hey, guess what? Your Cerebus hardcovers are going to be done through Alfonso.” He's not gonna scream out loud and start pulling his hair out kind of thing.
Matt: Well, so, because ”The Last Day” only technically had one printing, because it was all done at once, the signed edition and the unsigned edition, and that print run lasted for 15 years, do you guys know what that print run was?
Dave: No.
Matt: Okay. I mean, I'm assuming the bill for it might be in the Archives someplace.
Dave: Yes! [laughs] Which is one of those, pretty much everything is in the Archives someplace, but that would be backtracking over 18 years. I could ask Rolly about that, because Rolly is the one who, when I finally got to the point where I went, okay, we need to get a little more organized on this, in terms of, this stuff doesn't have to be at Camp David because it's not something that we're going to have to refer to. And that's definitely in that category, receipts from 2004-2005. So, that would probably be a couple of questions for Rolly, like, did you prioritize putting this stuff in order over at the storage unit, which is the alternative place to put that material, so that if I said to you, can you get me Preney Print & Litho, those receipts or bills for printing for 2005? They are, it's pretty organized from that standpoint, that all of the Preney Print & Litho bills in a box full of Aardvark-Vanaheim bookkeeping for a given year are in the same place. So it's like, if you dig through the pile, and you find the Preney Print & Litho bills and pull them out, it'll be in there somewhere, and it will have the quantity listed with it. But everything that Aardvark-Vanaheim has always been hurry up offence stuff, it's like, we don't they don't have time for a huddle. [laughs] We're just, everybody here's what we're doing, get on the line, we're gonna run the play, let's hope we get some yards out of this, let's hope we get some major yards out of this, and that's the way I've lived my whole business life from the 1970s on.
Matt: Well, I just… cause if, like the minimum Marquis order would be a thousand books, and a thousand copies of “The Last Day” would last probably another 15 to 20 years, does your storage have enough room for those copies if we were to like Kickstart a, “This is what the bill is gonna be for a thousand copies, you know, plus extra for shipping them all.” Would it make sense to try to do the pie in the sky, hey, let's raise 20 grand, print a thousand copies or whatever the cost would be, or is it the, going through Alfonso just in the long run gonna be the smarter deal because it's going to make more sense of okay, we only print 50, 60 extra copies and when those are gone, those are gone, and then we'll think about printing again?
Dave: Yeah, I mean it's a gut instinct call. I think that's where we're going, I think that's where printing and publishing are going with a capital G, as opposed to going with a lowercase g, or going in quotation marks. We've always been going in that direction. Talking to Kim Preney on the phone a while back and saying, I really wish that you could see Alfonso's press that he prints comic books off, because Kim knows the size of the presses that they had, the Heidelberg Web Offset Presses, and it took up a lot of space. You needed an industrial basin size area in order to accommodate it, and Alfonso has it as part of his comic store operation. It's like it's a comic store in basically a large strip mall and one of the smaller stores, he's moved into one of the larger ones, but it's still not Walmart sized or anything like that, and it's like the press fits over in the corner. The same thing that the pre-press that we used to do… oh, the name of the place slips my mind! But the first time that they upscaled to an industrial basin location, it had to be the size of a Walmart or a superstore, and it was all just, “This is what we do here. We do pre-press printing, so this is the section where everything gets pasted up. This is where the negatives are shot, and then over here is shipping department, etc etc.” When they finally went out of business, and we stuck with them right to the end of “Cerebus”, they were in a strip mall in a very small store location, and still doing everything that they were already doing, but the technology had become microscopic compared to what it used to be. The guy that used to own the operation was one of the partners, that it was interesting because he was showing his girlfriend the operation, and was showing her pre-press material done physically, and ours was the only one, and that was the first time that it dawned on him, “We're doing everything else on computer and when ‘Cerebus’ comes to an end, that'll be it. Everything is done on computer and when everything can be done on computer, it doesn't have to be done at an office or in a store sized location, it's just inside your computer on your desk. So, ultimately that's where publishing is going where, probably I will, [laughs] you know if I'm still doing this 20 years from now, I'll be printing the comic books here at the Off-White House. Just, you know, slap them into the unit and hit the start button, and ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk, here the comic books come, wrap them up and mail them.
Matt: Oh geez, that sounds like work.
Dave: Alfonzo is doing it now, but that's just because he's right sized for 2022. I would be completely astonished if he was still the right size as a printer come 2030 or 2035.
Matt: I know that one of Paula's patients wrote a book because she's a veteran, and she's publishing it through Amazon, so the deal is you go to Amazon, you buy the book, and then they print one copy, package it up, and mail it to you. Because, you know, it's Amazon, they can afford to do that kind of stuff. And I'm like, yeah, but at the same time, do you want to do it that way? Like it's one of those, at that point when you're send in the file, you better be 100% sure that it's gonna print the way you want to print and there's no typos and all that stuff, cause, as soon as it’s a, “Okay, I clicked the button, now I got a copy of the book” it just worries me as a, you know, if all your I’s aren't dotted and all your T's aren’t crossed, something's gonna go wrong. And I’m pretty sure the margins for, “Okay, you sold three copies of your book, and minus the shipping cost and the printing cost, here's your cut” and you get like $5 as your royalty or whatever. Is this really a way that you wanna try to run a business?
Dave: Yeah, it's, I don't think it's any way that anyone wants to run a business, but want has very little to do with it when the technology juggernaut is, like I say, Going this way, capital G going, not “it might be going this way” or “it might not be going this way”. No, it's going this way. It's always going to be going in the direction of smaller and more self-contained. The same as, no, Hollywood spends a lot of money on movies that are shot on giant cameras that aren't really necessary anymore in terms of being able to film something in high enough definition that when it's enlarged up to the size of IMAX or even a regular film screen, you can do that on your cell phone now. That's where technology has capital G Gone. You can fetishize the giant 70 millimeter cameras and all of that kind of technology, which they do, but eventually that's going to catch up with you. It's the same thing with Stephen King testifying about the merger of Penguin Random House and whatever else it was, two of the top five publishers, and this will reduce competition and mean that the authors that would ordinarily get a very large advance will get be getting smaller advances because there's less competition in publishing. It’s like, uhh, I don't think people are really getting advances anymore! It's interesting that you're talking to Stephen King, when was the last time that Stephen King got an advance, and how much of an advance did he get for his book, and how much did his book sell? It's like, if you're talking about “The Shining”, then you're talking about one thing. If you're talking about the last book that Stephen King wrote and how that did on Amazon, that's in a completely different category.
Matt: Well that's, I saw some of the highlights of it, and it's one of those, I don't absorb the news the way I should. I get it all through osmosis, and it's like I hear about, “Oh yeah, you know, Random Penguin House and Simon & Schuster are gonna combine.” I’m going, that's one of them real great ideas on paper, and then it's, “We're the number one publisher in the world.” It's like, yeah, but how many books are you guys putting out? The same as you did when you're two separate companies, or half as many because now you're one giant company?
Dave: Right.
Matt: I mean, any kid out there today dreaming of, “I’m gonna be the next Stephen King”, no, no man, Stephen King's probably the last Stephen King. There's not gonna be a…
Dave: Yeah, JK Rowling was the last Stephen King, I think. And yeah, I agree with you on that. It’s the other thing is, how many of your books as Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, let’s list every book that both of you published last year, and how are they doing. How many of those books, first of all, earned back their advance, and second of all, actually made money, and third of all, actually made an appreciable amount of money. That's something that they don't talk about a whole lot, that, whoever the, I forgot the name of the authoress who wrote the book and wanted the cover of “Church & State” Volume Two as part of her cover…
Matt: I always get her name wrong. Give me half a second…
Dave: What’s that?
Matt: I always get her name wrong, give me half a second to get to my nightstand.
Dave: Okay [chuckles]. While you're doing that, I remember reading, “Okay, this is a New York Times bestseller author” and then when it came time to say, “Okay, we're doing the paperback edition of the hardcover, and we would like to pay for the rights to use the ‘Church & State’ 2 cover on the paperback” and I forget what the sales numbers were, but they were definitely, there were Cerebus trade paperbacks that sold more back in the day than this book sold to become a New York Times bestseller. It was just 3000 copies? 5000 copies? It's really turning into a “world's tallest midget” kind of thing.
Matt: “Somebody with a Little Hammer” by Mary Gaitskill.
Dave: Thank you! I was gonna wander over to my cupboard, because I know exactly where it is, under “Cerebus the Cartoon Messiah”, and in with the, I believe, the Spanish hardcovers of “High Society” and that's the one! That’s the one that we're talking about.
Matt: It was one of those, I had extra money in Amazon or something, and it was on my list of, okay, when I have a little extra money, I'm gonna buy this book. Cause every time I go to the bookstore, I'd be looking for a copy, because I want to find it in the wild, and finally I'm like, no, screw this, I'm just gonna order off Amazon and get the damn book now.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I got it and I started reading it, and I'm like, yeah, this has nothing to do with an aardvark other than she liked the character in high school, and that's why he's on the cover of the book.
Dave: Yeah, yeah, it was, I mean that too is faint, where whatever it is, and it was really just that cover that meant that to her, that she had put it, I think she had wrapped a photocopy of it or something around her notebook that she wrote in. I read parts of the book when I got it in. She was kind of interesting, talking about Norman Mailer, just in terms of the fact that most women don't read Norman Mailer, wouldn't read Norman Mailer, and certainly would have nothing favorable to say about Norman Mailer, and she wasn't in any of those three categories. So there's always a certain kind of admiration that I get for women that are willing to buck the “This is what you're allowed to do as a feminist, this is what you aren't allowed to do as a feminist” because Norman Mailer is definitely in that category. “No, we don't talk about Norman Mailer, and we certainly don't treat him as uh as somebody worthy of favorable comment.” But I don't read books, because I don't really have time to read books. I'm just doing Strange Death of Alex Raymond, everything for me after that is pretty much newspapers these day,s which is, I'm not going to get internet access, and I'm not gonna become an internet junkie, but it really is interesting what people are turning themselves into and don't realize that they're turning themselves into something unrecognizable of what they used to be. And I gotta say, I really think that that's the internet. I don't think you could have been a journalist 20, 25 years ago. You needed to have the internet come along and turn into this litmus test of of thinking the right way, and somehow merging that with what you think journalism is. So it's for me, again, coming from the 20th century and still being in the 20th century, these people are plumb crazy! [laughs] But it's worth reading on a daily basis. I read the National Post daily, and the Waterloo Region Record Monday and Wednesday, the Toronto Sun Monday and Wednesday, the Epoch Times Friday. Started picking up the International Express, the London England paper, on Wednesday because that's real traffic accident stuff. [laughs] That's English journalism, which was already crazy 30 years ago and now has really turned into something quasi-human, now that it's merged with the internet, and is trying to appeal to internet people. I was reading the article the other day about there are immune people, like Beyonce, and Taylor Swift, and Harry Styles, who have such a rabid fan base that they get good reviews on everything, because you find out what happens to journalists who dare to give, you know, Beyonce two stars out of five. And it's like, oh man, you couldn't have made that up 25 years ago. It would be, no, no. Human free will is a much stronger thing than that. [laughs] It's like, no, it's not! That's another one of those capital G Going, Beyonce is taking us nowhere good, and I can only afford to say that because we are so micro small and of no interest to those people that we're not going to have what they call it doxing because Dave Sim said something unfavorable about Beyonce on Please Hold for Dave Sim.
Matt: Note to Matt, don't put a #Beyonce when we put this video up! [laughs]
Dave: Right! Right, let's not go looking for trouble, because there is nothing but trouble over there. I have no idea where that level of capital I Immunity from criticism is capital G Going, but it's going nowhere good. Really bad when it merges with politics. I mean Justin Trudeau was completely, completely capital I Immune to criticism, and still pretty much is in Canada, and it's like, boy, that's really, really unhealthy. That's just asking a personality type like Justin Trudeau, “Hey, would you like to be the Chairman Mao of Canada?” “Hey, sounds like fun! Yes, I think I can decide for everybody what's the way Canada is going to go, and if you don't agree with that, well, hey! Say goodbye to your career.”
Matt: That’s…
Dave: Okay now we're coming up on two hours. We're gonna wrap this up, you got any last comments on that?
Matt: Well the best thing that anyone can do is something my Dad did to me when I was young, more energy and muscle than brain, and working my first job and basically had the attitude about, you know, I walked on water and my crap didn't stink. And my Dad's like, “Listen, you think you're irreplaceable?” and I'm like, yeah! There's no way they could replace me. He's like, “Alright, go get a five gallon pail” and I'm like, what? He’s like, “Get a five gallon pail, fill it full of water, put your hand in, splash around, have fun, pull your hand out. If you don't leave a hole in the water, you're not irreplaceable.”
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: And that's the kind of lesson that, up to a certain point you can say… like, if I tried that with any of the kids I work with now, they'd be like, “What? I don’t get it” Like, I'm trying to tell you, you could be fired and replaced tomorrow. You think you can't, but you could! And that's, you gotta stay humble of okay, you know, I may not know everything but I know what I know, and I could be wrong. That's the phrase that I think people say and they don't really think it anymore is, “You know, I could be wrong but!”
Dave: Right. Right. Yes, I think that one of the things that the Epoch Times keeps talking about is how communism and totalitarian impulse have invaded and basically taken over the academic world. I think it's very hard to argue against that. My solution to that is, only teach facts, don't teach opinions, and don't teach anything that's in dispute, because what you want to do is teach facts up to a specific point, and then teach critical thinking, the way to craft an argument. The way to refute something that you disagree with, apart from ad hominem attacks. “Okay, you know, you don't like this guy, but what about the ideas that he's presenting?” You should really only in school be teaching the boiling point of water, Newton's laws of motion, irrefutable facts. Here's the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E, no, we're not going to create another alphabet that's not as colonialist, kind of thing. If you just stick to irrefutable facts, then you don't have to worry about that. Then it's, “Okay, facts are over here, and opinions are over there, and never the twain shall meet” is, I think, the only way to repair this gargantuan blue state versus red state thing where everything degenerates into an argument with both sides pointing at the other and going, “Totalitarian!” It's like, okay, there's nothing totalitarian about the boiling point of water. It boils at a specific temperature, always has, always will. Let's just deal with that and forget about climate change, that's opinion stuff. Just, that's external to education in terms of “just teach facts and stay away from opinions.” Okay! It's another Please Hold for Dave Sim in the can, Matthew!
Matt: It is in the can! My recording app is turning red saying, “Okay, you're almost at the end of your recording. What are you gonna do?” and I'm thinking, this is a perfect time to say, okay good night, Dave!
Dave: Good night, Matt! We'll see you next month.
Matt: Same bad time, same bad channel.
Dave: Take care.
Matt: You too, bye!
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: Okay, so, Dave's offer, thousand dollars sketchbook cover, or you want to give more money, you get a better cover. That's, you know, 10 bucks is 10 bucks, is the best way to put this. So everybody dig through the couch cushions and see what money you got left. I mean, I understand there's Kickstarters up the wazoo, and you gotta save up for the 44 different Turtles covers. I mean, there can't possibly be that many, right? Right? Okay, last one out turn out the lights, and be good to each other, and whatever you do! This is the part where you're supposed to say “Like, share, and subscribe” but I don't care about that. So after this find some classical music and just… or old Bugs Bunny cartoons with classical music, and get some culture. Okay, goodnight everybody!
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
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.
And I got my copy of #69, and it has a Journey story in it. I think it's new:
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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 40% off the December 1-2nd. And 35% off December 3-18th*
*Sale dates are not final and therefore subject to change.
And I've been instructed to say:
Make sure to remind your customers to place their orders by the shipping cutoff dates to ensure their goodies from your shop arrive before Christmas! (*Note: These dates apply to all regions.)
- Standard Shipping: December 14th
- Ground: December 16th
I don't think any of you care, but as the TeeGods command...
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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:
- Page 12 and 13 of issue #102
- Page 20 of issue #86
- Pages 18 and 19 of issue #166 (coming soon)
- Page 11 of issue #200 (coming soon)
- Page 14 of issue #200 (coming soon)
- 2 different slabbed copies of #1.
- Other stuff.
Thanks to Steve for sending the links.
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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: Either Jen posts, or she doesn't. I can't make her do anything...
1 comment:
Just for OCD clarity: I was not involved in a Cerebus / Yoda commission.
I don't think I ever worked with Dave on any commissions; Gerhard did some wonderful (of course) commission work for me. Budgetary constraints kept that to a smaller level than I would like, but I'm grateful for what I have!
Steve
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